They Die Alone: A Ross Duncan Novel - Tapa blanda

Chicago 1934 and it is the end of prohibition and the era of the Public Enemy.

Ross Duncan is a laconic, world weary bank robber, haunted by his conscience and the recent death of his partner during a bank robbery.

After the murder of an aging mafia enforcer, Duncan is ‘hot property’ and receives job offers from the competing Irish and Italian mobsters, both hoping to secure his services before the other does. The Irishman and the Italians unwittingly hire him for the same job – the assassination of the Federal Prosecutor.

But he is betrayed by his greedy accomplices on another job. No longer sure who he can trust, he manoeuvres his way between the two gangs, especially round the scheming and dangerous Irishman. Duncan is also on the run from J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI. He falls in love with his dead partner’s beautiful younger sister, Elinore, with her laudanum addiction and who is in the clutches of The Irishman as his underworld moll.

Duncan is caught right in the middle of it all and in grasping for a chance of moral redemption from his life of crime, he finds his decisions and actions have been made at an unbearable cost.

At the end, we find Duncan catching a late night train out of Chicago, lost, a failure, overcome with grief and exhaustion, and waiting for the soft, cool respite of dawn. This is a cool yet fast-paced and violent story of Tommy guns, cold gin martinis, sharp repartee, piles of cash, and deadly betrayals.

‘... a stiff noir cocktail: sharp dialogue, shadowy settings, and severe, coldblooded violence’ Kirkus Reviews

Christopher Bartley, a pen name, is American with a PhD in Clinical Psychology and is presently a Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii and Director of Clinical Research at The Menninger Clinic in Houston, Texas. The teaching responsibilities and consultancies in worthy and prestigious establishments are too numerous to list here. He still finds time to sit on a large number of editorial boards and is a reviewer of countless psychiatric, behavioural research, mental health, obesity, depression and anxiety (to name but a few) journals and academic papers. He has had his works published in letters, papers, in journals and scholarly books, often making scientific presentations, and has written for media such as Time and The Huffington Post. He directs research and conducts clinical trials on chronic combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder mostly with prisoners and combat veterans, working to improve their mental health and separate science from quackery. He has had an interest in American history since hearing a first-hand account of the Battle of San Juan Hill from his great-grandfather as a child, and then learning later of his father’s military service in Vietnam. He is also fascinated with the history of jazz, gangsters, bank robbers and baseball, all of which seems to converge in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. Writing noir crime and thriller novels set in the period just after prohibition affords him an enjoyably different aspect from his work and allows him to delve into research of one of his favourite periods. Follow Christopher Bartley on Twitter: @christobartley