Mark Smith is the author of The Death of the Detective, the runaway New York Times Bestseller and beloved National Book Award finalist that is one of the most admired, compelling and unforgettable crime novels ever written.
A National Book Award Finalist! An epic, Dickensian novel about a detective and the killer he stalks...and who stalks him...through Chicago, laying bare the city and its seething soul in all its complexity. Widely regarded as a stunning literary achievement and perhaps the best detective novel ever written.
Mark Smith is a writer who, like Thomas Wolfe has a gift: the magical ability to transmute familiar and trivial elements of live into images of distinction, rarity and fascination.
Only Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March . . .can
rival Mark Smith for visceral engagement with the place. His descriptions of the city are relentlessly inventive, filled with mixed emotions . . . Always counterpoised against Chicago's industrial dreariness is its irrepressible vitality, the beauty of its soaring skyscrapers, and its setting on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan. . . (the novel's) stylistic richness is simply extraordinary
Mark Smith as emerged as one of the most ambitious, original and thought-provoking novelists writing today
More than any novelist writing today, Smith has managed to combine the broad and penetrating social vision that comes to him from the detective tradition with an artistic seriousness that makes his book perhaps the best American novel of the year.
Mark Smith is a craftsman of formidable proportions.