My upcoming novel, “The Gangster Crown,” is now available for pre-order!

Lately I’ve done a couple of articles about my new crime novel, The Gangster Crown, but I’m happy to say that it will soon be available. On December 17, 2024, the book will come out on Amazon Kindle and in paperback. Here is where you can pre-order it for Amazon Kindle. The paperback will be available for sale on the day of release, December 17 (or, if not on that day, shortly afterward). The book is $2.99 on Kindle. If you are interested in getting it, please pre-order before December 17. The reason for that is that the more pre-orders come in, the higher the book will rank upon its debut. Many of you came through for me on my last book, Daniel Vanished, in April, so I’m hoping you can do it again this season.

The Gangster Crown is a classic underworld rise-and-fall story, but with some twists. It takes place mostly in the 1990s, in a fictional Midwestern city called “Mandan City,” which resembles Omaha, Nebraska. Instead of being a bootlegger or drug dealer, as many gangster kingpins in fiction are, the main character, Terry Cavanaugh, rises to the head of a criminal syndicate based on shoplifting. But wherever he came from, he ultimately comes into conflict with the city’s Mafia boss, Joel Gaetano, who was under the mistaken impression that he was Mandan City’s emperor of crime. The clash between them—and the toll that wearing “the gangster crown” takes on Terry’s character and psyche—power much of the subsequent plot.

Though I have no experience running a criminal syndicate, much of The Gangster Crown comes from my own life. Terry begins his criminal empire while working a dead-end retail job at a mall—similar to jobs I had at the time, the mid-1990s, before I went to law school. Indeed there’s a chapter that involves an inventive heist from a department store which, while it didn’t happen in real life, could definitely have happened at the store I worked at in 1994. I also incorporated a lot of my own recollections of what Omaha was like in the 1980s and 1990s. Mandan City, incidentally, is the same location in which my coming-of-age novel Jake’s 88, published in 2019, takes place, so I guess The Gangster Crown takes place in the same “literary universe.”

There are subtle LGBTQ references in The Gangster Crown. Most of the lead characters in my novels are LGBTQ, especially B (bisexual), an identity that I feel has virtually no representation—or, when it does show up, the wrong representation—in fiction. Though it’s not the focus of the novel by any means, it’s there in the background.

Unlike many of my other books which have taken years to write, The Gangster Crown came together relatively quickly, mostly during this year, 2024. I often remember material in my books based on where I was and what was going on when I wrote them. Hence, Daniel Vanished is “the heat wave novel,” with its latter sections written during a terrible spell of 100-plus-degree temperatures in July 2023. Some parts of The Gangster Crown were written at the coastal resort of Gearhart, Oregon, so it’s my “coast novel.” My nephew, something of an expert on cars of the 1990s and 2000s, suggested the various flashy sports cars that Terry drives throughout the book.

If you have any interest in the book, I hope you enjoy The Gangster Crown. Again, preordering before its release on December 17 would be really wonderful. Thank you, as always, to everyone who reads and watches my stuff and supports my work. I’m always grateful to have an audience, whether for my history work or my fiction.

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