Tuesday, September 25, 2018

What is Peter Blauner reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Peter Blauner, author of Sunrise Highway.

His entry begins:
Whenever somebody asks me what I'm reading, the answer is usually three or four books at the same time, and chances are one of them will be by Tolstoy.

Yeah, I know it sounds pretentious - but that's only if you haven't actually read Tolstoy. He wrote so many things in so many different genres over such a long period of time that most open-minded readers should be able to find something to appreciate. He wrote epics, novellas, philosophy that influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., political tracts, fables, soap operas, psychological studies, children's stories, religious texts, and what seem to the modern eye like dark crime stories. I devoured Anna Karenina a few years ago and then read his short fiction obsessively. But for some reason...[read on]
About Sunrise Highway, from the publisher:
From Peter Blauner, the writer Dennis Lehane calls "one of the most consistently bracing and interesting voices in American crime literature," comes a new thriller about a lone young cop on the trail of a powerful killer determined not just to stop her, but to make her pay.

In the summer of Star Wars and Son of Sam, a Long Island schoolgirl is found gruesomely murdered. A local prosecutor turns a troubled teenager known as JT from a suspect to a star witness in the case, putting away a high school football star who claimed to be innocent. Forty years later, JT has risen to chief of police, but there's a trail of a dozen dead women that reaches from Brooklyn across Long Island, along the Sunrise Highway, and it's possible that his actions actually enabled a killer.

That's when Lourdes Robles, a relentless young Latina detective for the NYPD, steps in to track the serial killer. She discovers a deep and sinister web of connections between the victims and some of the most powerful political figures in the region, including JT himself. Now Lourdes not only has to catch a killer, but maybe dismantle an entire system that's protected him, possibly at the cost of her own life.
Visit Peter Blauner's website.

Writers Read: Peter Blauner.

--Marshal Zeringue