Created by Harry Turtledove
If only…
It’s the 1950s, and hard-drinking, chain-smoking, hard-boiled Los Angeles JACK MITCHELL is right out of central casting — except that the post-war mean streets he goes down are teeming with creatures Marlowe never had to deal with: vampires, ghosts, wizards, talking cats, zombies and assorted creepy crawlies, in Twice As Dead (2025), the first in the proposed City of Shadows trilogy.
What? You don’t remember vampires, ghosts, wizards, talking cats, zombies and assorted creepy crawlies wandering the streets of Los Angeles in the fifties?
We may’ve seen it all before, but this latest mish-mash of horror and fantasy and the Shamus Game is being perpetrated this time by Harry Turtledove, pretty much the acknowledged “Master of Alternative History.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harry Turtledove is the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of a number of bestselling series and standalone novels. He received his PhD from UCLA in Byzantine history and worked as a technical writer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education before becoming a full-time fiction writer. He’s written a number of successful series, including the Crosstime Traffic series, the Darkness series, and the Worldwar I Colonization series, among others, twisting and turning history inside out, while his standalone works include Ruled Brittania, Every Inch a King, Conan of Venarium, Household Gods, and Justinian.
UNDER OATH
- “Turtledove admirably adheres to the noir aesthetic with his street-level focus on the resilience and resistance of society’s outcasts. Readers waiting for Walter Mosley’s next hard-boiled novel will fill the time nicely with this sympathetic but unsentimental tale of the ghostly underclass.”
— Publishers Weekly
NOVELS
- Twice as Dead (2025) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
- Lightning Runes (2026) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Silent Succubus (TBA)
- Mandeville Canyon (TBA)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts
Things That Go Bump in the Night, and the Eyes Who Go After Them
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
