Jay Russell Books In Order

Greed and Stuff

It’s the story of a man named Marty.

Once he was a very busy TV sitcom star.

Then he kind of burned out and became a washed up private eye.

Now Marty Burns is back on television, playing a P.I. and trying to make rehashed ‘Hawaii Five O’ scripts sound convincing.

While he’s waiting to find out if his show is renewed it’s not doing well with the 18 34 year olds, Marty stumbles across an enigma involving the classic noir film The Devil on Sunday, a shady remake, and a very real corpse.

Greed & Stuff is Jay Russell’s strongest novel yet a fast moving, wise cracking L.A. story peopled with fascinating characters, brim*ming with brio, and driven by a compelling mystery. This novel confirms Russell’s standing as one of the hottest young voices in the mystery field.

Waltzes and Whispers

Jay Russell has written several novels. Now comes this first collection of his shorter fiction. As you read you will understand that each story is answering a question: How would Dracula have passed his time in the twentieth century? If virtual reality allowed the meeting of minds in cyberspace, then you would need virtual cops, wouldn’t you? If death is not the end of love, is that a blessing or a curse? How might the resonances of history or the power of abstract ideas bleed into our everyday lives? If the dead came back to life, would they have the same needs as the living, or would it just be sex, drugs, and zombie rock ‘n’ roll? What does lie over that rainbow? These stories are sometimes savage, sometimes satirical, but always entertaining as Jay Russell dares to ponder the imponderable.

Brown Harvest

What happens when the Boy Detective grows up, moves away, and comes home for a visit? His hometown has turned from American as apple pie to darkest noir, his once innocent girlfriend has transformed into something both more and less than she was, and his father has become a bum. Both parody and tribute to childhood heroes, Brown Harvest appropriates characters familiar to anyone who grew up reading detective stories. Borrowing from the Hardy Boys to Jay Cantor Krazy Kat and setting the characters on a collision path with hard boiled thrillers, young adult mysteries, and classic noir fiction, Jay Russell creates joyful mayhem.