It’s been some time since we did a book giveaway, so let’s make up for that lost time with the new trade paperback edition of The Last Quarry.

Back in the early days of Hard Case Crime, their books were published in the old-fashioned mass-market paperback form. When HCC moved to Titan as their home publisher, the format was changed to a somewhat larger trade edition. The Last Quarry was intended to conclude a series that was pretty much defunct after its four mid-‘70s books at Berkley and one book at Foul Play Press.

As I’ve reported here before, The Last Quarry was an unexpected success (I am always surprised when something of mine moves from cult favorite to actual success). This initiated a still in-progress revival of the series including an award-winning short film (“A Matter of Principal”), a feature I co-wrote (The Last Lullaby, from The Last Quarry), and a one-season Cinemax TV series, as well as many more series entries plus a graphic novel.

This has now led to new trade-size editions of The First Quarry (September 2025), Quarry in the Middle (pub date as yet unannounced), and The Last Quarry (April 2025). The latter book will include two short stories, “Guest Services” and “Quarry’s Luck” (previously collected in Quarry’s Greatest Hits, the only Quarry volume not reprinted by HCC). This new edition of The Last Quarry also has an essay by me charting the development of Quarry, including his unexpected revival. And what a Robert McGinnis cover it has!

And what of the giveaway? The deal is this: you agree to write an Amazon and or Barnes & Noble review in exchange for the receipt of a copy; you are released from this obligation if you don’t like the book. You have to wait till the pub date to do an Amazon review (Barnes & Noble reviews are also fine). Ten copies are available. USA only.

[All copies have been claimed. Thank you for your support! –Nate]

These do go fast.

Now, there are all kinds of flavors of Amazon-type reviews. Some are a sentence or two or three, and some are actual mini-essays. If you do something on The Last Quarry of the latter nature, you can send it to me (and Amazon!) and I’ll share it here.

I am hopeful we’ll have another book giveaway here very soon, if I can lay hands on some extra advance copies of the final Mike Hammer novel, Baby, It’s Murder, which comes out March 4, the day after my 77th birthday.

Is it really the last Mike Hammer novel? Truthfully, I have a couple of brief openings by Mickey that may become short stories, or even novels, if the much-promised Mike Hammer movie happens. I would also probably go after the movie novelization of that, again…if it happens. I also have a Mike Danger novel that Mickey did a complete draft of, which I hope to revise into a Hammer one. Due to the science fiction nature of the Danger novel, it was not included in the batch of titles from Titan that complete the official canon.

I also have a science-fiction/horror-tinged complete screenplay Mickey did, which I could turn into a novel, and would frankly like to do so. Unfortunately, the horror novel The Menace (from another unproduced Spillane screenplay) that I wrote for Wolfpack hasn’t earned enough sales to command a follow-up.

Speaking of Wolfpack, all three of the John Sand novels that Matt Clemens and I wrote, including our short story collection Murderlized (which includes a John Sand short story), are on sale as an e-book collection of all four books for a mere 99-cents.

I feel the John Sand novels are among my least known and least read books, and hope any of you who have been on the fence about them take advantage of this incredible price. For the uninitiated, John Sand (in the world of these novels, set in the ‘60s) is the real-life spy who Ian Fleming based James Bond upon. I think this represents some of the best Collins/Clemens collaborations. Matt, of course, was the co-author of all my CSI novels.

Buy the John Sand collection on e-book right here.

And while we’re at it, here is a link to the three Spillane titles I did for Wolfpack. These are Mickey’s final YA novel (edited and introduced by me), The Shrinking Island; Stand Up and Die (a Collins-edited collection of Spillane novellas, including a Mike Hammer I co-wrote); and the aforementioned The Menace, co-written by me from an unproduced Spillane screenplay.

Paperback:
E-Book:

E-Book:

Listen (and that’s the operative word here), I could not be prouder of True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, my ten-episode immersive-audio adaptation of the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective. Director Robert Meyer Burnett has done an incredible job with an incredible cast. Michael Rosenbaum makes an ideal Nate Heller. The seventh episode has either just dropped or is about to.

With my longtime crony Phil Dingeldein behind the camera, we have been doing a series of video commentaries about each episode.

Please don’t watch these till you’ve signed on for the audio series at truenoir.co. If you’ve read True Detective you can probably understand what I’m talking about. But you should really listen to each episode of True Noir, then check in with the appropriate one of these after each one. Nonetheless, here are episodes three, four, and five.

Chapter Three:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncwysQ3kIDY

Chapter Four:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKvSPEOd4J0

Chapter Five:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plz_PAPPqac

M.A.C.