Created by Craig Adams
“Life boils down to just a few moments that matter, and not always for the better.”
The author is clearly a fan of the genre, and must’ve pounded on his keyboard like it owed him money, in the no-holds-barred The Lying Spiral: Some Truths are Better Left Undiscovered (2025), which introduces Edge City hardluck private eye ELI GENTRY. Even the long-winded title doesn’t back down.
An Edge City cop for a few years, Eli now grinds it out as a PI, but he’s not exactly setting the world on fire. He smokes too much, he drinks too much, he occasionally goes home with the waitress (the way he always does?), has a bum knee, and he’s dead broke. And because this is noir, he’s also full of regrets and guilt, haunted by childhood memories of a world gone suddenly, irreversibly wrong. Not that adulthood has turned out any better for him.
There are no half-measures here. Edge City is a cesspool “as rotten as a banana at the bottom of a gym bag. A place where silence and deceit are bought and sold like just another commodity,” and Eli, we’re reminded, is “a burned out investigator, tormented by ghosts.”
But maybe, just maybe, things will get better, when he’s hired by Brad Winston, the son of one of the city’s most powerful and wealthy men, to find Josie, his missing girlfriend.
Yeah, things will get better. Sure.
This is a deep wallow in both the hard-boiled and noir genres, cranked up to at least eleven, full of tough talk (Eli narrates it all, of course) and his play-by-play bobs and weaves with wry observations and plenty of gritted-teeth similes (some more successful than others). It is, as the Booklife review puts it, “all rough edges and raw nerves.”
THE EVIDENCE
- A nun gives him a “glare that could curdle holy water.”
- “… a face like a freshly moisturized alabaster.”
- “I know things about him, he knows things about me.”
— Eli describes his relationship with a cop
STRAIGHT FROM THE AUTHOR’S MOUTH
- “Sometimes, the greatest battles are fought within ourselves, against the ghosts of what might have been.The process of bringing Eli Gentry to life has sparked further ideas. This novel is an origin story for a character who has many more tales to tell.”
— Craig Tyson Adams - “I started writing to entertain myself. I like gritty stories. Stories that could be based in reality. The stuff I like is written in a way that grabs me by the booboo and is hard to shake.”
— Craig Tyson Adams
NOVELS
- The Lying Spiral: Some Truths are Better Left Undiscovered (2025) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
