Award-Winning Noir Fiction Author Janet Roger
SHAMUS DUST
HARD WINTER, COLD WAR, COOL MURDER
Shamus Dust is classic literary noir at its finest. A beautifully rendered and intriguing post-war mystery.
BRUCE ROBERT COFFIN Author, Detective Byron Mysteries
Prose so smooth, so sweet, so swinging it will dance you straight back to the 1940s ... A wonderful, wonderful book.
JAKE NEEDHAM Author, Mean Streets Crime Novels
Roger can write like a dirty, noir dream that thrashes in the small hours with enough action and drama to keep the blood pumping. A superb debut.
CHRIS NICKSON Author, Creme de la Crime
Shamus Dust is a noir homage that reminds us the blackouts may have ended but the city’s darkness lingered on; it’s an evocative, haunting debut.
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER Penguin Author, Bryant & May Series
The reader feels the chill of a winter in London as the chill of murder and danger. The book gets my highest recommendation.
ERIC HOFFER AWARD
Shamus Dust | Front, back and between the covers
Two candles flaring at a Christmas crib. A nurse who steps inside a church to light them. A gunshot emptied in a man’s head in the creaking stillness before dawn, that the nurse says she didn’t hear. It’s 1947 in the snowbound, war-scarred City of London, where Pandora’s Box just got opened in the ruins, City Police has a vice killing on its hands, and a spooked councilor hires a shamus to help spare his blushes. Like the Buddha says, everything is connected. So it all can be explained. But that’s a little cryptic when you happen to be the shamus, and you’re standing over a corpse.
This is great - it's elegant and spare but still cloaks itself in a terrific atmosphere. I liked the backstreet whores and the tipster barbers; the gold-leaf dining rooms and the tenement bedrooms. For me, it rang of Chandler - a grey-skied, British Big Sleep.
Atlantic Books