"Windy City Sinners is a freewheeling, wry and whimsical novel about the deepest human feelings and questions." PATRICK T. REARDON (patricktreardon.com) Part crime caper à la Donald Westlake, part magic realism tale in the spirit of Gabriel García Márquez, part John Kennedy Toolesque hijinks and high comedy, Windy City Sinners offers mystery and mayhem with fun and froth mixed in for good measure. The story takes place on the Far Northwest Side of Chicago, right on the edge of town where the cops and members of the Outfit live side-by-side in perfect disharmony. The unlikely partners in crime include a notorious hitman, a detective in league with a drug kingpin, a vengeful mailman, an embezzling bank clerk, a petty holdup man, a conniving cleaning lady, an embittered priest, and the ghost of composer Antonio Vivaldi. At sugarskullpress.com, watch a book trailer for Windy City Sinners and check out our classic and gothic mystery titles.

Windy City Sinners: A Novel

Villines, Melanie

Literature & Fiction

Sugar Skull Press

Father Brown Mysteries: The First Dozen Cases (The Innocence of Father Brown)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

CHESTERTON, G.K.

Mystery

The title story, "Death at the Excelsior," introduces readers to British private detective Elliot Oaks and his more experienced boss Paul Snyder in P.G. Wodehouse's only attempt at a detective story, which he pulls off with his signature comic twists and turns. The collection also offers a selection of other classic Wodehouse tales, including those featuring the author's most famous creations -- Bertie and Jeeves. "Wodehouse is an anodyne to annoyances. He's a tonic for those suffering from bearable but burdensome loads of boredom, from jadedness of outlook and dinginess of soul." THE NEW YORKER "Wodehouse is the greatest comic novelist ever." Douglas Adams  "P.G. Wodehouse's comic gift was built on his brilliant capacity for repressing unpleasantness." THE ATLANTIC "P.G. Wodehouse is literary Prozac...there is no surer antidote to the fantods, the blues, mean reds or damp, drizzly Novembers of the soul." Christopher Buckley

Death at the Excelsior: And Other Stories

Wodehouse,P.G.

Short Stories & Anthologies

Mystery stories set in early 20th Century London, featuring Father Brown, a Roman Catholic priest with deep insight into criminals and crime -- the Lt. Columbo of his day. "[Father Brown] is one of the greatest of all great detective figures...His field of knowledge is human nature, and his skills are observation, reason, and common sense." KINGSLEY AMIS "The Father Brown stories are brilliantly written in a style richly complex, imaginative, vigorous, poetic, and spiced with paradoxes...Chesterton was one of the first writers of detective fiction to realize that this popular genre could be a vehicle for exploring and exposing the condition of society and of saying something true about human nature." P.D. JAMES

Father Brown Mysteries: Ten Classic Cases (The Wisdom of Father Brown)

"My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick out an Agatha Christie book. GILLIAN FLYNN, author of Gone Girl "[Agatha Christie wrote] brilliantly compact, stylized and efficient mysteries...the genre in its lean classic English form fit her like a cat burglar's thin black glove." JOHN UPDIKE, author of The Witches of Eastwick "I love Agatha Christie's novels." TRUMAN CAPOTE, author of In Cold Blood "I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys the rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very personal things." MICHEL HOULLEBECQ, author of The Map and the Territory

The Secret Adversary: A Tommy & Tuppence Mystery

CHRISTIE,AGATHA

Literary

"It is hard to conceive of a more extreme character than Sherlock Holmes...with his monomaniacal focus on crime, fits of depression, cocaine injections, clouds of tobacco smoke, melancholic violin-playing, and bursts of furious energy once the game is afoot. Holmes is a brilliant creation, but he is excessive in every way. And Holmes' cases are filled with the exotic and bizarre--deadly trained snakes, ancient curses, dart-blowing dwarfs, mask-wearing children, rooms with crushing walls. A supernatural aura floats over many of the tales, unworldly forces are frequently evoked...It was Conan Doyle's genius to place the bizarre imaginings of his mind within an apparently realistic setting." MICHAEL CRICHTON "Every writer owes something to Holmes." T.S. ELIOT "The pairing of Holmes and Watson has triggered more imitators than any other duo in literature." JOHN LE CARRÉ "[Holmes} is probably the only literary creation since the creations of Dickens which has really passed into the life and language of the people." G.K. CHESTERTON

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN

Classics

Ten ghostly tales of the Gilded Age from one of America's finest writers -- Edith Wharton (1862-1937), author of The Age of Innocence, winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize. "Wharton's graceful sentences create dramatic, populous tableaux and peel back layer after layer of artifice and pretense, of what we say and how we wish to appear, revealing the hidden kernel of what human beings are like, alone and together." FRANCINE PROSE "Despite all her privileges, despite her strenuous socializing, she remained an isolate and a misfit, which is to say, a born writer." JONATHAN FRANZEN "...Wharton has as much to say to us now as she did to readers in the first half of the [twentieth] century. She is indisputably one of our finest writers." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Ghost Stories

WHARTON,EDITH

Genre Fiction

DETECTIVE STORIES FROM THE AUTHOR WHO INVENTED THE GENRE -- EDGAR ALLAN POE. "It is because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films." ALFRED HITCHCOCK "Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE "Mr. Poe has that indescribable something that men have agreed to call genius." JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL "Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic..." GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe: Featuring C. Auguste Dupin

POE, EDGAR ALLAN

First published in 1878, The Haunted Hotel is among the later works of Wilkie Collins, famous for his 1868 novel The Moonstone, widely considered as the first modern English detective novel. The Haunted Hotel is notable for its atmosphere--a decaying palace in Venice--as well as intrigue among members of the aristocracy. "Wilkie Collins invented the genre of the English detective novel." T.S. ELIOT "Wilkie Collins is the author of probably the finest detective story ever written." DOROTHY L. SAYERS "Collins authored the best detective tale in the world." G.K. CHESTERTON

The Haunted Hotel

COLLINS, WILKIE

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