Scott Phillips

Rake

A Novel

Celebrity and crime pay off big time for an American sociopath in Paris in “one of the great joys in new noir fiction” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

Dr. Crandall Taylor—or rather the actor who plays him—is enjoying a cushy new life in the City of the Lights where his now–cancelled American soap opera has become a prime time retro cult hit. This newfound stardom isn’t wasted on him. Anxious to keep his brutal past a secret from fans, he’s enjoying all the fruits that fame has to offer: adulation, entrée into the trendiest clubs, and sex. What he really wants is to fund a feature film.

Crandall uses his charm and intellect to draw into his narcissistic web four women: a horny network executive; an internet porn star; a bookish university student with a nasty bent; and the fetching starlet wife of an arms dealer. Crandall accepts both the crime lord’s cash and his beautiful wife’s advances. Big mistake. Now Crandall must channel his violent, megalomaniacal dark side just to stay alive—and on the run.

From the national bestselling author of The Ice Harvest comes “an ingeniously twisty old–school noir along the lines of James M. Cain” (Spinetingler Magazine). With it, the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know . . . quintessential American huckster . . . and in Phillip’s sly, deft hands we find ourselves sinking down eagerly with him, glorying in the beautiful muck” (Edgar Award–winning author Megan Abbott).

The Adjustment

The war is over, but that doesn't mean things are getting better. For PR man Wayne Ogden or any of the returning vets. The town of Wichita, Kansas—built around the industry of Collins Aircraft and its wealthy founder, Everett Collins—is not how they remember it. Against the background violence committed by the returning soldiers trying to make an adjustment back into civilian life, Wayne attempts to destroy his former mentor and take down Collins Aircraft—the once fabled company that provided planes to Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, and Wiley Post. All along the way he is haunted by poison pen letters, anonymously sent, that carry threats alluding to his black market work as a supply sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps. As the letters reveal more and more of Wayne's secretive wartime past, his plan to destroy Collins and his company takes an increasingly darker turn that leads to blackmail, extortion, and murder. Phillips expertly crafts an instant noir classic that presents the birth of a postwar American criminal.