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Sam Truman Mysteries book cover 1
Sam Truman Mysteries book cover 2
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Sam Truman Mysteries
Series · 3 books · 2012-2013

Books in series

Catch My Killer book cover
#1

Catch My Killer

2012

Sam Truman is a disgraced and unlicensed former private investigator without a proverbial pot to piss in. During a morning mission to scrape up enough bread to pay his rent at the flophouse, Sam intervenes in an attempted robbery and ends up shooting the robber to death with a gun he isn’t legally permitted to possess. In the aftermath of the shooting, Sam is visited by the bloody corpse of the dead robber, which is now being inhabited by the spirit of a murdered woman who charges Sam with the task of solving her murder. Now Sam is up to his neck in a dark underworld of walking corpses, black magic, and Hell’s own army, and all because he agreed to a dead woman’s plea to “Catch my killer!”
Soft Kiss, Hard Death book cover
#3

Soft Kiss, Hard Death

2012

Sam is hired by a man whose extramarital dalliance has resulted in a lot more than he bargained for when the girl in question deposits something horrible inside his body and then promptly dies. Now Sam finds himself chasing the dead girl’s doppelganger all over the City, from seedy bars to the city morgue, in an effort to discover what she is and how he can stop her before she can spread her bizarre brand of lovemaking to another poor sap!
The Pale Man book cover
#5

The Pale Man

2013

When a mysterious woman hires Sam Truman to find both her brother and a family heirloom known as The Pale Man, Sam is grateful for the money. So grateful, in fact, that he’s willing to enter The Phillips-Rogers Project, a tenement known for its hellish conditions and abundant crime, in order to find them. What he finds inside The PR, however, is something horrible and not of this world. Nightmares wait inside The Phillips-Rogers Project, and The Pale Man holds the key.

Authors

Nate Southard
Nate Southard
Author · 14 books

Nate Southard is moody, shy, lanky, bald, and has bad skin. When he isn’t writing, he’s probably cooking Thai food or fried chicken. Seriously, he has something like fifty fried chicken recipes. It’s ridiculous. He recently discovered coffee-flavored ice cream, and it’s ruling his entire world. Did you know if you mix it with chocolate ice cream, you can kinda make mocha ice cream? Nate does! Nate lives in Austin, Texas. He sucks at skateboarding. Nate Southard's books include Will the Sun Ever Come Out Again?, Scavengers, This Little Light of Mine, Red Sky, Just Like Hell, Broken Skin, and He Stepped Through. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Nightmare Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Black Static, Thuglit, and LampLight. His short story "Going Home, Ugly Stick in Hand" received an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow's The Year's Best Horror, and he earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination for his story "In the Middle of Poplar Street."

Tobin Elliott
Tobin Elliott
Author · 5 books

Tobin was destined for horror. This became obvious when, in the span of two weeks, he built a working model of a guillotine out of popsicle sticks and a razor blade—which his Grade Five teacher didn't seem to appreciate as much as he did—and he also learned to tie a noose and proudly hung one from their apartment balcony—which his mother and the superintendent didn't seem to appreciate as much as he did. Eventually, he learned to focus the horror into stories. His friends and neighbours likely appreciated the lesser PDH (Public Displays of Horror). Besides writing ugly stories about bad people doing horrible things, Tobin also

  • taught Creative Writing at both Durham College and Trent University (Oshawa Campus) for two decades
  • was a founding board member of the Writers' Community of Simcoe County (WCSC)
  • was a member of the Writers' Community of Durham Region (WCDR)
  • for five crazy years, took part in the annual Muskoka Novel Marathon, a three-day writing marathon to raise money for adult literacy programs in the Simcoe/Muskoka region. Tobin has been lucky enough to see quite a few works published in the past decade or so...
  • his first published work, a horror novella called Vanishing Hope, was through Burning Effigy Press - Stealing Corey was a semi-finalist in the Whispered Words contest and was published in the subsequent Whispered Words anthology, published by Piquant Press
  • the third novella-length installment of the Sam Truman Mysteries, Soft Kiss Hard Death, was published by Abattoir Press
  • this, along with the first two novellas, were later collected into the The Sam Truman Mysteries Omnibus Volume 1
  • his novella, The Wrong was the final book published by Burning Effigy before they went into extended hibernation (Tobin tends to have that effect on people and publishers) - Prison Break was published in the Nancy Kilpatrick-edited anthology, Expiration Date, published by Edge SF & Fantasy Publishing, and was singled out by Ellen Datlow in The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eight as one of the standout stories - Fight or Flight was published in Purgatorium: The Element of Horror anthology, by ID Press - Nightingale was published in Allucinor: The Element of Romance anthology, by ID Press - The Riff was published in Nefariam: The Element of Crime anthology, by ID Press - Horse Guts Horse Guts was published in Released: A Horror Anthology, by No Bad Books Press
  • possibly his weirdest bit of writing, "EGR 181: Cyclopean Architecture" was published in Nafallen University 2022-2023 Course Catalog, by Madness Heart Press Since COVID-19 pressed the great pause button, Tobin managed to complete his six-book APHOTIC horror series (which he's delighted to be able to call a "hexalogy") and are being released at two-month intervals. The Six Books of the Aphotic
  • Bad Blood
  • Out For Blood
  • Blood Loss
  • Blood Pact
  • Blood Relations
  • Flesh and Blood Tobin has been married for 32 years, and has one son and one daughter, and one relatively brainless dog. He's retired from a large Canadian telecom company where he was a Communications Specialist. Tobin counts embarrassing his wife and kids, pointing out the stupidities of others, being dumb to kind animals and killing plants among his hobbies. Finally, Tobin loves feedback, either positive or negative, on his writing. You can find him reviewing on Goodreads/LibraryThing/The StoryGraph or saying stupid things on Instagram
Ed Kurtz
Ed Kurtz
Author · 19 books
Ed Kurtz is the author of THE RIB FROM WHICH I REMAKE THE WORLD and other novels. His short fiction has appeared in numerous collections, and has been honored in Best American Mystery Stories as well as Best Gay Stories. Kurtz lives in Minneapolis.
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