Product Description

After the sudden disappearance of two high-priced detectives, former Indianapolis cop Frank Behr—the brooding private investigator introduced in David Levien’s nationally acclaimed novel City of the Sun—is pulled into a case that is harrowing, relentless, and, ultimately, personal.

[quote tk in box, pls]

Early in the dark, Indianapolis morning, Frank Behr’s friend and mentor is murdered—with no motive and no trace of evidence left behind. Behr, a quiet, mountainous former cop, thirsts for answers and retaliation. But before he can make headway in the dead-end investigation, an exclusive private firm approaches him with a delicate proposition: two of its detectives have gone missing, and the firm wants Behr to find out what happened to them. Prodded to take the case by his old boss—the Indianapolis chief of police who holds the strings to Frank’s possible return to the force—Behr accepts.

The search for the missing detectives takes Behr into the recesses of Indianapolis’s underworld, a place rife with brutality and vice—and a stark contrast to the city’s gentle public image. As Behr calls on old street contacts and his hard-boiled investigative skills, he is led deeper into a twisted society of organized crime and an unknown landscape of “pea-shake” houses—low-rent, transient gambling rings staged in condemned buildings around the city. Unexpectedly, Behr uncovers a shocking thread connecting the missing detectives to his friend’s brutal murder, and, in the process, Behr is forced to confront an ominous, deadly new breed of crime family.

Introduced in City of the Sun, Frank Behr instantly attracted critical attention and a devoted fan base, and Where the Dead Lay places Behr on a broader, edgier stage. This extraordinary crime novel stands with the best of Michael Connelly and Lee Child, featuring a brilliantly drawn, ruthless criminal family whom readers will not soon forget, and showcasing the immense talents of David Levien.

www.doubleday.com

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77972 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-07
• Released on: 2009-07-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385523677
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Christopher Reich Reviews Where the Dead Lay

Christopher Reich is the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Deception, Numbered Account, and The Runner. His novel, The Patriots Club, won the International Thriller Writers award for Best Novel in 2006. His latest thriller, Rules of Vengeance, will be published in August 2009. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Where the Dead Lay:

Welcome to the Jungle. Open the first page of David Levien’s terrific new novel Where the Dead Lay and you’ll find your shoes firmly planted on the mean streets of Indianapolis, Indiana. This is tough turf, home to hell-bent criminals, double-dealing lawyers, lost souls seeking redemption, and a brooding P.I. named Frank Behr who, as his name implies, is the toughest of them all. It’s a dark world full of shifty, dangerous characters and Levien paints it as a masterpiece of grays and blacks. We’re talking Caravaggio here. Chiaroscuro. We’ve walked these streets before, in Detroit, D.C., and Miami Beach, with authors like Ross MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, and Peter Blauner. But it’s been a while since a new author has shown up to rival them. Enter Mr. Levien.

His first novel, City of the Sun, established his bonafides. I read it in a day and I came away shaken. This was a crime novel of a different order. Sure it had solid plotting, an unbeatable ear for dialogue, and compelling characters. But it also had a depth of humanity and pathos that lifted it out of the genre. Where the Dead Lay continues in this rich and satisfying vein.

When Frank Behr’s Brazilian martial arts instructor is brutally murdered, Behr is compelled out of friendship, and a student’s duty, to investigate. The serpentine trail leads to the city’s underbelly, notably to the Schlegels, a family of small-time hoods with big-time ambitions, and no compunction about doing whatever necessary to realize them. Levien’s writing shines in his depiction of the bad guys. They don’t come to life so much as walk in your front door, sit down on the edge of your bed, and put a gun to your head. They are real. They are scary. Behr has plenty of his own problems to sort out along the way. The “dead” referred to in the title are as much from the past as the present. It’s Behr’s internal struggles that make him a memorable hero and lend the book its eloquent voice.

Where the Dead Lay delivers on all counts.

It is crime fiction at its finest. —Christopher Reich

(Photo © Katja Reich)

Amazon Exclusive: An Essay by David Levien

Some Things You Need to Know

Many people ask me for advice on writing a crime novel, how to go about it and what they need to know. The question provokes in me the immediate desire that they had asked someone else—say a Hammett, or a Chandler, or an Ellroy, a Leonard or a Child—someone with a pile of books to his name and a patina of mastery, and not me with my two crime titles (City of the Sun and Where the Dead Lay) so far. Though the responsibility and length of a proper answer is daunting, here is a short one: you need to know at least a little bit about a lot.

You need to know a little bit about guns, a touch about surveillance, at least something about police procedure. Some knowledge of the law can be useful, perhaps a basic understanding of fighting and physical violence. You need grounding in the facts or history of crime—the way organized crime works, about various frauds, how a gambling ring takes its profit, the elements of extortion, the layers of a drug operation. This stuff and more is the stock in trade for my character Frank Behr—it’s what keeps him alive—so I’ve had to learn it.

You may not have an ex-police officer, Secret Service Agent, and private investigator for a stepfather (who also happens to be a great guy) as I am fortunate to, or count amongst your friends ex-cops and various experts in the field. But if you can get a ride-along or develop some relationships with law enforcement, it will surely help.

More than all that though, you need a sense, or at least a theory or idea, as to why these people do what they do. This goes for the bad guys as well as the good guys, your heroes and your villains alike. Whether you are dealing with dissociative personalities, sociopaths, or full-blown psychopaths, or drawing the obsessive types who pursue them. What makes them get started crossing that line, or trying to hold it, and what makes them keep going when the odds are against them? It’s not easy supporting oneself by scamming or dealing or boosting, and it’s no easier trying to stop it.

Oh yeah, then you’ve got to write it all down. Now that’s the part where real advice is called for, and again, please ask someone better qualified than me to give it. But if you do set out, and you happen to find yourself frozen by the specter of the thousands upon thousands of crime books, many of them true works of literature, that have come before yours, you could always resort to what so many of the greats have from time to time—steal a little.—David Levien

(Photo © Peter Andrews)

From Publishers Weekly
Indianapolis PI Frank Behr juggles two cases in Levien's disjointed follow-up to City of the Sun. When Behr's Brazilian jujitsu instructor is shot to death execution-style at the Brazilian's martial arts studio, he decides to investigate unofficially. A real job soon comes Behr's way when a high-powered PI firm asks him to track down two of their missing investigators, who disappeared in the middle of a case involving derelict properties being used for illegal gambling dens. In taking a close look at the gaming dens, Behr comes face to face with a family of thugs who have launched a turf war to secure a monopoly on neighborhood crime. Despite the book's hefty body count, Levien is more interested in exploring the nature of violence, contrasting the controlled beauty of jujitsu with the unpredictable dangers of gunfights. While readers will admire Behr's determination to solve his friend's murder, some may feel that case distracts too much from his formal assignment. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Relentless … The story conveys a piercing sense of honesty … The truth of the characters—and the intensity of their pain—is as unbearably real as it gets.”
—New York Times Book Review

“City of the Sun is going to be a finalist for thriller of the year.”
—Rocky Mountain News

“[Levien] infuses his … tale with heart-wrenching emotion.”
—People

“City of the Sun is hard, mean, beautiful, touching—a dazzling novel.”
—Robert Crais

“A master character portrait of Behr.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“David Levien’s novel is moody, riveting, and special.”
—Harlan Coben

“One of the toughest, most gut-wrenching, and most believable suspense novels I’ve ever encountered.”
—Lincoln Child

“Veteran screenwriter David Levien imagines with icy, almost sadistic precision in his thriller City of the Sun.”
—Entertainment Weekly

Customer Reviews

Frank Behr Takes On A Ruthless Crime Family
What an exciting discovery David Levien has turned out to be for this reader. His "City Of The Sun" was a masterful and disturbing debut novel and "Where The Dead Lay" proves that that effort was just the beginning of a long and very promising career for Levien and his signature character, Frank Behr.

Behr is a brooding, conflicted, yet compassionate ex-cop turned PI who is seeking to lay his past to rest in order to truly begin living his life fully again. Indeed, his character is so well written, fleshed, and real that the plot is often secondary to his inner struggles to do the right thing at the right time. He is a bear of a man and a gritty street fighter trained in mixed martial arts yet these qualities do not serve to help him deal with his inner demons.

In "Where The Dead Lay", Levien involves Behr in two separate cases that converge sooner than later into a single stunning case that will require all Behr's training, experience, and intuition to not only solve, but to survive. Initially Frank's close friend and Brazilian martial arts master is killed in a seeming execution at his studio. Feeling personally affronted, Frank moves to solve the case on his own time. Almost concurrently, a high powered PI firm asks for his help in finding two of their operatives who have gone missing. When Behr turns them down, his old boss and nemesis, Captain Pomeroy, leans on him to get involved.

These two cases ultimately throw Frank into a desperate life and death struggle with the Schlegels, a ruthless, violent, amoral family preying on the innocent (and the not-so-innocent) with no conscience or remorse as they attempt to gain control of an underground gambling enterprise in Indianapolis among other criminal pursuits. The ruthless Schlegel crime family is so realistically portrayed that the reader will shiver involuntarily at times. There is a sub plot involving his girl friend, Susan, that will leave the reader wondering quizzically at the end.

Levien has a gift for incorporating humanity and human emotions into the hard boiled noir world of Frank Behr. His characters are real, credible, and possess the depth needed to get the reader to quickly wonder about them and care about them. His pacing is at times breathless but never without including the human element of the protagonist. His plots are real, entertaining, and remarkably fresh. I unequivocally recommend this book and series to any fan of the hard-boiled thriller genre.

Pea Shake Anyone?
This is one of the best crime novels I have read. I thought author David Levien's debut novel, City of the Sun, was good, but this is much better. It's about Frank Behr, former Indianapolis P.D. detective, who was wrongly booted off the force. Now he's a P.I. with a small, struggling practice.

The book opens when Behr finds the shotgunned body of his friend and Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor, Aurelio Santos. Behr vows to find the killer(s) on his own time.

A major private investigation agency hires him to find two missing operatives; seems the firm doesn't trust its own people to do the job. Indeed, the IPD pressures Behr to get involved; Behr is still respected by many on the force. Meanwhile, a brutal father, Terry Schlegel, uses his three sons (ages eighteen to twenty-two) as muscle in his attempt to corner the Indianapolis "pea shake" racket. The violent Schlegels are just a few of the lowlives that Levien weaves into the story.

Pea shake is an illegal lottery, apparently unique to Indianapolis, in which numbers are painted on plastic balls (or "peas"), shaken, and released from a container to determine the winners. It's played in "parlors" that are set up in houses and apartments scattered throughout the city, often in blighted neighborhoods. The players hang around, drink, and wait for an attractive young woman (that's part of it) to do the "shake." So, there's almost instant gratification or frustration. The players can bet anything from pocket change up to hundreds of dollars. It's not regulated, so there are many scams. Levien doesn't really look much at the game itself. I feel there's a lot of potential there.

There's plenty of action as the Santos/missing agents/Schlegel story lines converge. Behr comes off as a clean, honest man in a scummy, corrupt world. Behr has compassion, and he considers the impact of his deeds. Most of the other characters in the book are greedy, shallow, and amoral.

Behr is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu master and a gritty street fighter. He needs these skills to survive some tough battles, which Levien graphically describes.

Levien deftly looks at the seedy side of Indianapolis, a major city that has somehow flown under crime fiction radar.

Another Page-Turning Thriller from Levien
I was a fan of the first Behr book and couldn't wait for this one to arrive. It didn't disappoint... I read it in two days. Levien writes bad guys as well as anyone out there... they are all so well drawn and conflicted and three-dimensional... I found myself racing through the Behr-centric chapters so I could get back to the Schlegels. If you haven't read the first book yet, buy them both. I'm just disappointed I have to wait a while to see who Frank Behr is going to tangle with next.