Jack Chase – författare

The Show of Stolen Goods is a catalogue for an exhibition at The UhaulGallery featuring items people have stolen from their jobs.

New Orleans, 1888. A storm locks five strangers in a saloon on Tchoupitoulas Street. Cards get dealt. Whiskey gets poured. Nobody is who they claim to be.Joe Battle walks in looking for buried money. Freddy Lee sits at the table sweating through his shirt, running from a killing he can't outrun. Wayne Dickinson plays the Southern gentleman a little too well. And when Abraham Abernathy—war veteran, former slave, and brother to the man Freddy murdered—steps through the door, the card game becomes something else entirely.Then there's the bartender.A "e;must-read"e; locked-room Western noir from Jack Chase about debts, disguises, and the violence men bring with them when they think they've left it behind.

What would you do if you woke up inside the life you always wanted?Arthur Meyersworth is twenty-seven and stuck—stuck in a mediocre advertising job, stuck in a decaying apartment in Reseda, stuck being perpetually "e;next in line"e; for a promotion that never comes. Once a promising DJ, now a cubicle fixture and break room zombie, Arthur copes the way he always has: too much alcohol, late-night television, and the quiet hope that tomorrow might feel different.Then he wakes up in the Hollywood Hills.Arthur is suddenly rich, famous, and successful. The career he dreamed about is real. The house is immaculate. The city opens its doors to him without hesitation. He's become the version of himself he always believed he was supposed to be.But something is wrong.The woman in his bed looks at him like a stranger. Conversations feel rehearsed. Certain memories don't belong to him. And beneath the surface of this perfect upgrade is a question Arthur can't escape:If he's here… where did the other version of him go?As Arthur settles into his dream reality, he begins to sense that this life wasn't created for him—it was inherited. And the more comfortable he becomes, the clearer it is that success hasn't fixed what was broken. It's only made it harder to name.A darkly comic, psychologically unsettling novella about ambition, identity, and the quiet horror of getting exactly what you asked for, only to realize the cost may never stop being collected.

From the author of Made in America and The Bastard of Taylor's End comes a strange, claustrophobic descent into violence, denial, and a place that may not exist.A former middleweight arrives in Marrow's Point, a forgotten borough wedged between a river and a dead industrial district. The rent is cheap, nobody asks questions, and the streets have a habit of leading back to themselves. Beneath a dry cleaner lies The Verge, an illegal fight circuit run by Eldridge, a gaunt and unnerving impresario who speaks about violence, hunger, and probability as though all three obey the same law.The fighter gives himself a purpose: keep winning, get close to Eldridge, find the money, and take it. Meanwhile, a blocked number calls every day. He never answers.As the fights grow bloodier, the dates stop matching, hallways lengthen, streets rearrange themselves, and Marrow's Point begins to feel less like somewhere he found than somewhere he was meant to end up. Still, the phone keeps ringing.Because there are some things a man can outrun only by convincing himself he is running toward something else.

Six stories. Five nocturnal interludes. A world quietly coming apart.FORKSIn a town built over a nuclear testing site, a sleepless engineer watches his silverware disappear piece by piece.THERE'S A MAN AT THE DOORA fugitive checks into a roadside motel room that already belongs to someone else.THE CRYING WOMAN IN ROOM 202After a fight, a woman calls her boyfriend ninety-seven times from a motel. When he finally arrives, she is calmer and kinder than he has ever seen her—and knows things she shouldn't.MOONLIGHT JAZZOn January 9, 1947, a cartoonist shares coffee with a stranger hours before she becomes the victim of the most infamous unsolved murder in Los Angeles history.CAMP DOOMSix friends celebrating graduation retreat to an isolated mountain cabin, where a lonely local behaves as though he has known them all their lives.NIGHTMARE AT THE ELROY ON NOWHERE ST.A writer awakens from a nightmare about an empty Manhattan theater. Then its ballroom music follows him home.Spare, uncanny, and darkly American, Bad Times with Julian Mercer moves through nuclear towns, roadside motels, forgotten rooms, mountain roads, and cities emptied of everything but their machinery. Julian Mercer's first public collection is a fractured work of noir and psychological horror about isolation, obsession, evil, and the moment ordinary life slips—almost imperceptibly—into nightmare.Featuring Moonlight Jazz, Camp Doom, and five nocturnal interludes by Jack Chase, author of Made in America and Violent Crimes.

From Jack Chase, author of Made in America and The Schultz Brothers, comes a remastered and expanded edition of his signature horror story—the basis for the feature film now in development, written for the screen and directed by Chase. A slow-burn nightmare about the last summer of youth, the danger of being polite, and a stranger who only ever wanted to be welcome.Evans notices things. It's why he carries a camera everywhere. This is the last summer before he and his five closest friends scatter into separate lives, and their final weekend together takes them fourteen miles up Mt. Damascus, to a secluded cabin on a mountain the locals call Camp Doom.Forty-three road deaths in thirty-seven years earned it the name. Mike calls it statistics.Then they meet Gary Lott.Gary is friendly. Helpful. Lonely. He knows the trails, the lake, the boat rental hours. He remembers who owned their cabin years ago, right down to the curtains. He knows names nobody remembers giving him. He brings firewood. And when something begins circling the porch at night and testing the lock, Gary arrives with exactly the part needed to fix it.Then Evans's camera begins catching things nobody saw while they were happening—and two miles down the ridge, inside an abandoned lumber facility where Gary claims to live, he finds proof that the watching began long before they arrived.They came to the mountain for one last weekend together. Gary has been waiting much longer.

From the author of Made in America and The Schultz Brothers, Moonlight Jazz is a quiet, eerie tale of old Hollywood, loneliness, and one sleepless man who may have been the last person to see a vanished woman as she truly was.January 9, 1947. Hollywood is cold after midnight, and the clocks inside Mack's diner do not agree.Howard Crane is an insomniac cartoonist who has not slept in more than two days, alone in a booth working on another installment of The Dodsons, the syndicated comic strip that made him successful enough to stop enjoying it.Then a young woman in a black dress sits down across from him. She calls herself Liz. She is funny, curious, restless, and vividly alive in a way Howard no longer is. Over coffee, pie, cigarettes, and late-night jazz, they talk about movie houses, fathers, war, bad love, dead men, and the funny pages—the only part of the newspaper where nobody dies. And when Liz asks Howard to draw her, he does something he has not done in years. He sees someone.By morning, she is gone. Within days, the whole country will know her by another name: The Black Dahlia.

OVERTIME 2: BUENOS AIRES — AUGUST 2026Marcus Graves returns in Buenos Aires. The scale expands. The consequences do too.Marcus Graves is a drug dealer for the rich and famous.He was supposed to be a lawyer. Instead, he's the most sought-after cocaine courier in Los Angeles, a cartel's golden boy with a client list that reads like a Deadline article and a product line that arrives shrink-wrapped. The money is obscene. The hours are worse. The exit strategy doesn't exist.When his partner Buddy Reyes loses $168,000 worth of cartel product on a drunken tear through the city, Marcus is given a simple proposition: recover the stash or match its value by sunrise.What follows is a single night through the underworld that made him. A strip club owner with a switchblade and a real attitude problem. A trust-fund sociopath in the Hills with a .44 Magnum and a SoundCloud mixtape. Cartel triggermen who don't ask questions twice. And an old friend who knew Marcus before the money changed his area code.Every room is a trap.Every deal is a betrayal.Every hour brings him closer to sunrise and further from the person he was supposed to become.Marcus Graves is going overtime.A profane, relentless, and darkly comic roller coaster ride through the Los Angeles underworld.

VIOLENT CRIMES 2: BLACK BUTTERFLY — COMING 10.31.26Preorder now.The Saturday before Thanksgiving, eighteen-year-old Evelyn Armstrong comes home to Bronxville, New York. By sunrise, she is missing. Three days later, searchers find her body in the woods near Twin Lakes, and a town built on old money, good schools, and the illusion of safety discovers how quickly one murder can poison everything around it.FBI profiler James Prince arrives from Manhattan with a famous name, a failed marriage, a young daughter he sees in rationed hours, and an instinct for violent offenders so sharp it has made him one of the Bureau's best. Prince reads people the way other investigators read evidence, but Bronxville gives him too many versions of the truth at once: grieving parents, frightened students, teachers with impeccable reputations, old grudges resurfacing under pressure, and a victim whose private life proves more complicated than anyone wants to admit.Evelyn's father, Richard Armstrong, has no interest in waiting for the FBI to catch up. A decorated former Navy SEAL with two combat tours behind him, Richard spent years learning how to move through hostile ground and hurt people efficiently. Now he has a daughter in the ground and no patience left for procedure. While Prince builds his case, Richard begins dismantling the town one door, one lie, and one suspect at a time.Then winter arrives all at once.A historic blizzard closes over Westchester, burying roads, knocking out power, and isolating Bronxville beneath snow while the investigation tightens and Richard's private war accelerates beyond anyone's ability to control it. Prince knows the killer is still somewhere inside the town. Richard knows only that someone took his daughter from him.Both men are getting closer.Only one of them understands what they are getting closer to.

From Jack Chase, author of Made in America and The Schultz Brothers, comes one of his earliest and most haunting works.Nick Demming has worn the badge for thirty-two years. On his final day with the SFPD, he's forced to confront everything he's lost along the way—his family, his purpose, and maybe his soul.As he patrols the city's fog-bound, tech-gutted streets one last time, Nick crosses paths with violent criminals, old friends, a lost young woman, and the ghosts of his own past. But what he doesn't expect are the small moments—of connection, of reckoning, of fleeting grace—that might offer him a sliver of redemption.A "e;fascinating,"e; "e;poetic,"e; and elegiac vignette that captures the weary poetry of a city and the men who try to hold it together.

Billy Castle is twenty-five years old, commuting from Queens to Manhattan to serve drinks to uptowners, keep his alcoholic mother afloat, and outrun the reputation of a father whose name still echoes through certain corners of the city—whose ostensibly random murder in a liquor store by an unknown shooter when Billy was a child left behind nothing but a name that carries weight in all the places Billy has spent his whole life avoiding.On his first week working at the Palace, one of Manhattan's most exclusive nightclubs, Billy witnesses the execution of an Italian capo in the loading dock after being sent down to retrieve a crate of booze. Instead of silencing him on the spot, the club's untouchable owner—who moonlights as the city's most feared contrabandist—Archer Stone, gives him a moment to make his case. The air changes when he hears Billy's last name, and from that moment on, Billy's life begins to follow a path he swore he'd never take—and one he never expected to be so intoxicating.Forced into the role of accomplice, the novel's five-act structure follows Billy's ascent through a world of ambition, loyalty, and violence, where power moves quietly and nothing stays buried. Meanwhile, federal agent Dean Willis is hunting Archer Stone, chasing fragments of a past he can't fully remember—one that may tie all three men together in ways none of them can imagine, and potentially reveal the devastating truth behind his missing wife and daughter.Touted by readers as "e;a triumph in crime fiction"e; and "e;impossible to put down,"e; Made in America delivers as a literary crime epic about inheritance, power, and the machinery of the American dream.

Francesca "e;Frankie"e; Walsh is thirty-two, broke, brilliant, and mean enough to survive New York's underground comedy circuit. Then a doctor gives her three months to live.The diagnosis is glioblastoma. The odds are terrible. Frankie's first instinct is to refuse treatment, light a cigarette, and find out whether dying makes better material than living ever did. Then, after one particularly disastrous set, she meets Paul Hayes, a once-promising singer whose body is being slowly dismantled by Parkinson's but whose voice can still stop a room. He is older, difficult, funny when he feels like it, and the first person to laugh at Frankie's jokes about dying.What begins over whiskey and bad comedy becomes an unlikely friendship built from late-night records, Staten Island ferries, radiation appointments, old songs, and the understanding that neither of them needs the other to pretend everything is going to be okay. As Frankie begins fighting for a life she had already decided was over, Paul is quietly reaching the opposite conclusion.And somewhere between them, Frankie is forced to confront the possibility that a life does not have to be long, successful, or even particularly happy to matter to the people who shared it.From Jack Chase, author of Made in America, Jokes About Suicide is a darkly funny, intimate story about death, friendship, and the terrible inconvenience of discovering you still want to live.