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Authors on Characters

Penmore Press authors offer a rich and entertaining array of short reflections on characters and how they were created in the novels. READ

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Thomas Laird

Author Bio for Thomas Laird
Thomas Laird was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1947. He grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and was educated in the public schools. He graduated from Northern Illinois University with a BA in English in 1971.
He moved to Peoria, Illinois in 1973 and has taught English and Creative Writing at Spalding High School and Notre Dame High School for 48 years. Laird finished his Master’s in English at Bradley University (December, 2010), and taught composition at Bradley University for four years.
His first story was published in the PACIFIC SUN LITERARY QUARTERLY in 1976, and he subsequently published several other stories in literary journals around the country. BLUE COLOR & OTHER STORIES, a collection of short fiction, was published by the Dan River Press in Maine in 1994. The two printings sold out. CUTTER (2001), his first novel, was published by Constable & Robinson in London, England, and by Carroll & Graf in New York. SEASON OF THE ASSASSIN (2003) and BLACK DOG (2004) were published by the same houses, and all three were translated into Czech by Domino Publishers in the Czech Republic. SEASON was also published in Dutch in the Netherlands. Domino published VOICES OF THE DEAD in 2006. THE UNDERGROUND DETECTIVE, Laird’s fifth novel, was published by Parkgate/Dionysus on April 14, 2012. DESERT STORM HEART was published, also, by Parkgate in 2013, and the ebooks of UNDERGROUND and DESERT came out in 2013-2014. Recent publications are: THE RUIN OF SOULS (Ecanus, April 2015), and from Endeavour Press in London, England, in 2015-2016: THE LONG MIDNIGHT, MY BROTHER’S KEEPER, HEALER, BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT (recently a Number 1 Bestseller on Amazon Kindle), IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT,
THE LAST SLEEP, and BLACK WIDOWER. CUTTER, SEASON OF THE ASSASSIN, and BLACK DOG were all reprinted in ebook and in paperback. All the Endeavour Press books are available in paperback and ebook. Forthcoming are CHILD OF THE NIGHT on March 17, 2022 and FEROCIOUS on July 21, 2022. Both will be available in paper and ebook on Amazon and Barnes&Noble.com. JIMMY PARISI BOX SET has been in the top 100 books on Amazon in the US, in Canada, and in the UK since its release on 2/3/25.
Laird lives with his wife, Marsha, and with Lulu the Sun Conure, and with Jimmy the cat near Germantown Hills, Illinois.

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Coldest Case

‘It’s always good to get in at the start of something major. And I think that Lieutenant Jimmy Parisi . . could be very major indeed. The publishers have come up with a winner here’ Mark Timlin, Independent  ‘This well-paced first thriller has an engaging narrator . . . and a new twist.’Publishers Weekly (CUTTER)
In the mid ‘50s, two teenage girls were found dead and naked in a ditch near Willow Springs, a suburb of Chicago. The case fell into the hands of Jake Parisi, a decorated veteran of World War II and an elite detective for Chicago Homicide. Parisi is relentless in tracking the murderer of the girls, but his efforts are in vain, and the case becomes ‘cold’, a Homicide’s nightmare. There were several suspects, but Jake could not come up with evidence to arrest any of them. He carried the burden of the homicides into his retirement, and he died in the ‘70s.
Jimmy Parisi, Jake’s only son and a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, becomes a Homicide detective like his father and shockingly becomes involved in a dual murder of two teenage girls who were also found nude and dead in a ditch near the location of the murders in 1956. It is 1982, twenty-six years later, and Jimmy and his partner Doc Gibron are eerily reminded of Jake Parisi’s ‘cold case’. Like his father, Jimmy is confronted with a similar dead end in his search for the killer or killers. But Jimmy Parisi is a bulldog, like his father, and he persists in the search.
A suspect from 1956 in the first pair of slayings comes into Jimmy’s gunsights, and the novel evolves into Hitchcockian suspense as to whether the murderer will get away with his multiple killings one more time.