Run Straight Down

On Monday, Principal Peter Galvin welcomes the committee that will evaluate Ribicoff High School for accreditation-just as someone guns down a student outside the main entrance.On Tuesday, homicide cop Abigail Teague tells him she fears that the shooting will incite a gang war. On Wednesday, student teacher Kim Dombrowik finds drugs in a student's locker, and there's a riot in the school cafeteria.Thursday really sucks.And the evaluation committee won't leave until Friday...The novel follows a principal, a student teacher and a female homicide detective on their journeys through the minefields of poverty, racism, and local politics to find a killer and stave off a full-scale gang war. While Laura Lippman's To The Power of Three and Jody Picoult's Nineteen Minutes have also dealt with a school shooting, Liskow, a former teacher, is the first to look at how such tragic events impact the teachers and students who inhabit the building and how the tragedy will change everyone who is involved, sometimes for the better, but usually for the worse.

Steve Liskow serves as a mentor for the Mystery Writers of America and writes the Grammar Guy column for First Draft, the newsletter for the Guppies, a subgroup of Sisters in Crime. He also conducts fiction workshops throughout the area and contributed to Now Write! Mysteries (Tarcher/Penguin, 2011). He was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, where he read Hemingway, Lardner, Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson, the local talent that helped shape his voice. He also devoured Sherlock Holmes and The Hardy Boys, writing his first mystery when he was ten. His mother typed it for him; when he saw his name in print for the first time, he knew that he wanted to be a writer. His ninth-grade English teacher was the sister of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke, so there was no going back. At Oakland University, he tempered his English major with moonlighting as a DJ on the campus radio station and playing bass in a band. He started out as a British Invasion fan, but fell in love with blues after seeing the Muddy Waters Band open for Martha and the Vandellas. His family moved to Connecticut while he was in college, and, since there were no teaching jobs in Michigan, he joined them after graduation. He taught English in New Britain and drifted into theater, where he directed, produced, designed, and acted in nearly 90 community theater productions. He also earned an MALS and CAS in literature from Wesleyan University and a Masters plus sixty in literature and theater. He has published several short stories, twice winning Honorable Mention for the Al Blanchard Award. ＂Stranglehold＂ appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine after winning the Black Orchid Novella Award for 2009, and Lee Child selected ＂Hot Sugar Blues＂ for inclusion in Vengeance, an MWA anthology published in spring of 2012. His earlier novels Who Wrote The Book of Death?, The Whammer Jammers, a thriller about roller derby, and Cherry Bomb, about teen trafficking along the Berlin Turnpike, are all set in New Britain. He lives in central Connecticut with his wife Barbara and two rescued cats. Visit his Web site at http: //www.steveliskow.com and like his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/#!/SteveLiskowCrimeWriter