An Essence bestseller, Before I Let Go
is the sexy story of three male best friends' dramatic search
for love, intimacy, and the perfect relationship.

Nate is a D-O-G with an obsession for conquering as many women as possible. But when he breaks his own rules and falls for two women at the same time, all hell breaks loose. Brendan is the type of man every woman claims to want -- at least until she gets one. Will he ever find a woman as sweet as he is, or is he doomed to be the poster child for "Good Guys Who Love Bad Girls"? Cory is successful, smart, and handsome. He's never gotten over his first love, and when he moves back to his hometown, he has to face secrets and make decisions that will change his life forever.

Before I Let Go is a sizzling, entertaining tale of how men come to terms -- in the most startling ways -- with lust, love, and life.

Amazon.com Review

James Collins's Beginner's Greek is a tender tale of how love conquers all, even if it takes longer than some might be willing to wait. Chick Lit fans especially will appreciate the uniquely male perspective that Collins, who spent most of his career as a journalist and an investment banker, brings to this modern fairy tale.

When 27-year-old Peter Russell boards a cross-country flight to Los Angeles, he fully expects to sit next to the love of his life. As luck would have it, he sits next to Holly Edwards, with whom he falls in love instantly. A lost phone number leads to years of wondering "what if," until Peter's best friend Jonathan introduces him to his new girlfriend, who is of course the same Holly of Peter's dreams. After Jonathan and Holly marry, Peter settles down with Charlotte, a Francophile who Peter tries to tolerate, but mostly just evokes feelings of pity and hatred. Of course, as with any fairy tale, the possibility for a happy ending is never truly out of reach, and Beginner's Greek is chock full of twists and turns to keep the action going.

While some of the dialogue may make readers feel like they just stepped out of a Victorian novel ("Oh no! I had no idea it was so late! Poor Peter! I'm sure you were coming to fetch me!"), Collins's characters convey enough depth to keep readers engaged through some of the more fanciful stretches of this captivating novel. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly

The two young professionals of Collins's polished debut, Holly and Peter, meet on a flight bound from New York to L.A. They tacitly understand they are soul mates, and she invites him to dinner, but Peter soon discovers that he has lost the number Holly wrote on a page torn from Mann's The Magic Mountain. With Peter's financial career and New York society as a mundane backdrop, years pass and Holly ends up married to Jonathan, a successful author and womanizer—and, conveniently, Peter's best friend. Still aching for his one-time seatmate, Peter marries Charlotte, a dull Francophile, because it made sense. Charlotte, of course, is also in love with someone else—a former flame, Maximilien-Francois-Marie-Isidore. At Peter and Charlotte's wedding, Jonathan is struck by lightning, precipitating an endless series of events that changes the lives of family, friends and lovers alike—including Peter's boss and Charlotte's ex-stepmother. Former Time editor Collins, 48, writes as if fully aware that anyone who saw any one of a thousand other romantic comedies will find the plot familiar: he plays romantic comedy clichés with an expert coolness. Anyone for whom chick lit is a guilty pleasure will find the tone here multiple notches above the usual fare. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

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Amazon.com Review

A Q&A with Max Allan Collins

Question: Chicago Lightning is a story collection about private detective Nate Heller. It's a rich collection, yet the stories number only 13--meaning that since 1984 (when the first Heller book, True Detective, came out), you've published only one short story for every novel.

Max Allan Collins: That wasn't intentional. I'm not a prolific short-story writer. I'm a novelist at heart, and these stories are all fairly long; little novels. Each one is a commitment--a lot of research goes into them. Like the novels, they're based on real cases.

Q: The stories mostly deal with little-known crimes, whereas the novels deal with some of the major mysteries of the 20th century: the Lindbergh kidnapping in Stolen Away, the Huey Long assassination in Blood and Thunder. Why look into these smaller, more obscure cases?

MAC: Well, that's the fun of it, isn't it? It shows Nate Heller in a different light. These are in fact the kind of cases that might have walked into a private eye's office in Chicago in the 1930s and '40s. And they're "small" only in the sense that they aren't well known. Some very famous names do appear--Eliot Ness is in two stories--and some of the gangsters are famous (or infamous, anyway). Frank Nitti and Mickey Cohen, for example.

Q: How did you find these lesser-known cases?

MAC: My longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, and I mostly scour vintage true-crime magazines. Then we do newspaper research and sometimes even visit the locations. What I like about these stories is that they tap into the roots of the classic noir detective, who began in pulps like Black Mask and in stories by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The whole idea of Nate Heller is to put the private detective back in the historical context he grew out of--and into real-life cases.

Q: What's the meaning of the title Chicago Lightning? Not all the stories are set in Chicago.

MAC: No, they aren't, but Nate Heller is a Chicago guy through and through. "Chicago lightning" means "gunfire" in Prohibition-era slang. Mike Hammer has New York, Philip Marlowe has L.A., Spenser has Boston, but Nate Heller long ago laid claim to mid-20th-century Chicago. And Chicago is the great crime capital of the U.S.A. Maybe the world.

Q: In some ways, Nate Heller is a typical private eye of the old school: tough and brave, with an eye for the ladies. But he doesn't always play by the Raymond Chandler "mean streets" code. He sometimes quits cases, takes bribes, sleeps around.

MAC: I've gone to some lengths to make Heller human, and to make him a specific human. Doing the classic private eye can put a writer in a narrative straightjacket--a lot of writers of this kind of story obey all of Chandler's "rules," not understanding that he meant those rules for himself and his Philip Marlowe character. I want Heller to be a real man: flesh-and-blood, flawed, but still able to maintain a certain shabby dignity.

Q: Will there be more Nathan Heller short stories?

MAC: I can't say. That will depend on whether or not George and I come across some other intriguing cases for Heller to look into. There will be a second collection, Triple Play, that gathers three short Heller novels. It comes out next April. One of the stories, "Kisses of Death," describes the circumstances of Heller's meeting Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s.

Q: What's next for Nate Heller?

MAC: In addition to Triple Play, there will be a novel, Target Lancer, that has to do with the Kennedy assassination. After Nate's nearly 10-year hiatus, I'm hoping to get back to a Heller novel a year for a while. Having all the Nate Heller series back in print is very gratifying. Many readers don't want to get involved with a series if the other books aren't available.

On the other hand, the Heller novels can be read in just about any order--I didn't write them in strict chronological order. The stories in Chicago Lightning are arranged by the year when the events take place, not the year when I wrote the stories. For people who haven't read any of the books, Chicago Lightning provides a really good sampling. With the novels, it's probably a good idea to read True Detective, True Crime, and The Million-Dollar Wound first. That's the Frank Nitti trilogy that started the saga.

From the Back Cover

Tough, cynical, and clever, Nathan Heller has been called “the perfect private eye,” the best investigator that Chicago (where 'lightning' means gunfire) has to offer. Created by New York Times bestselling novelist and Road to Perdition creator Max Allan Collins, the classic PI comes vibrantly to life in this collection of 13 stories, all based on real cases of the 1930s and '40s. In “The Blonde Tigress,” Heller encounters a vicious hold-up crew with a brutal female leader, while in “Scrap” he investigates a union shooting that has national implications. In “The Perfect Crime,” he goes Hollywood to protect the lovely Thelma Todd, with tragic results. The private eye finds himself tangling with notorious mobster Mickey Cohen in “A Shoot-out on Sunset” and with Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti, in “Screwball.” Heller’s friendship with Eliot Ness finds the two men working together in both “The Strawberry Teardrop,” in which Heller encounters America’s first serial killer, and “Natural Death, Inc.” Heller tackles each case with his trademark cynicism and humor, digging into the grimy underbelly of 20th-century America to uncover the truth at any cost.

Product Description

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

From Publishers Weekly

The wife of a prominent accounting firm executive has just been arrested for the murder of her husband and his afternoon pay-per-playmate, but the Chicago PD have their doubts about the open-and-shut case. It's up to longtime Collins heroine, Ms. Tree, the sexy brunette PI star of his graphic novel series, to clear the forest of red herrings and uncover the conspiracy beneath; of course, her tricky investigation is soon beset by deadly antagonists. Tree slips effortlessly into her first all-prose incarnation, though graphic is not an inaccurate description for this exceptional novel: Mike was sprawled on his back... his bare chest puckered with entry wounds and blood pooling beneath him, glistening with neon reflection. A psychiatrist Tree seeks out (for help with recurring nightmares) provides a framing device that keeps her complex tale unspooling smoothly, and Collins skillfully ties up a multitude of branches into the big, bloody bouquet one would expect from the author of The Road to Perdition. Sharp and satisfying, this is another must-have for fans of the Hard Case Crime imprint. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Author of Road to Perdition, the acclaimed graphic novel that inspired the movie, and of the multiple-award-winning Nathan Heller series of historical hardboiled mysteries, Max Allan Collins is one of most prolific and popular authors working in the field today.  He is also a filmmaker whose work includes Shades of Noir, Real Time, and the documentary Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane.