The novel is set in the lake country of northern Minnesota and the wilds of bordering Ontario. Former sheriff Cork O’Connor has decided to take life easy with his wife and teenage daughter. He’ll fill in the slack times with a little private investigator action or at least that’s what he thinks. The short-lived halcyon period is broken when Objibwe medicine man Henry Meloux (as in “mellow”) asks Cork to find his son that he fathered more than a half-century ago in the Canadian boreal forest wild lands.

One day, a young boy scares Noogie when he is the middle of restocking a machine in Fast Eddie’s Drug Hut by shouting ‘bang’. Noogie drops four thousand dollars in twenties all over the floor, screams at the kid and then gathers the notes up. It is only when he has loaded them all into the ATM that he finds a stray twenty under his shoe. It is then that the idea for the ‘perfect slow-motion heist’ occurs to him.

James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy and William T. Vollmann have some new company hanging out on their dark, rough, violent block. He’s Craig Davidson and here’s how he tells what he feels and sees…

Teddy Clyde has got it all together. The dude’s got a brokerage business out on City Line Avenue. A closet full of expensive clothes – business suits, tennis and golf outfits - you name it.

No one else tells the stories like Crumley, has his voice, his confidence or absolute fearlessness when it comes to putting down the wicked, horrible aspects of human existence, foibles of the worst sort only slightly tempered by our species’ better traits.

If Present Value was being pitched as a film one might describe it as Bonfire of the Vanities meets It’s A Wonderful Life. Sabin Willett has written a very entertaining novel that follows an upper-echelon New England couple and their two children from hubris to humiliation to redemption.

In No Man’s Dog Jon Jackson weaves a curious juxtaposition between his long-time hero “Fang” Mulheisen, a soon-to-be former Detroit cop, and his nemesis of many years, Joe Service, an ex-freelance contractor to the Mob.

The popularity of this self-absorbed, naïve dreck should astound me. It doesn’t considering the current woeful state of New York publishing.

Anyone who reads “Balls to the Wall” will gain a true, bloody taste for a slice of contemporary life that is all American, nasty, perverted, occasionally heroic.

“He’s actually a pretty good mechanic and somewhere in Philadelphia he’s running a pretty successful chop shop to this day.”