Bryan Gilmer reads from Felonious Jazz, with music from Sawyer-Goldberg band

Saturday

04/10/10

Thriller author Bryan Gilmer and Sawyer-Goldberg band swing FELONIOUS JAZZ live

Author Bryan Gilmer reads from Felonious Jazz, a compulsively readable crime thriller set in Raleigh. The reading will be accompanied Prairie Home Companion-style by the Sawyer-Goldberg jazz band.

If you enjoy thrillers by the likes of Michael Connelly, John Sandford, Lee Child or Carl Hiaasen, come discover author Bryan Gilmer, whose darkly comic crime novels are set in the Triangle. One reviewer called his FELONIOUS JAZZ, "one of the freshest novels I've read in some time," while another wrote, "The twist at the end had me screaming for more."

The Sawyer-Goldberg jazz band will accompany Bryan Prairie Home Companion-style as he reads scenes. And the band will play standards from Monk, Miles and other jazz greats as guests mingle and browse and Bryan meets readers and signs books.

Synopsis: When a top client of an elite Raleigh law firm comes home to find his McMansion burglarized -- and his new wife's dog dead in the kitchen -- the man suspects his ex-wife. But legal investigator Jeff Davis Swaine senses the killer is someone far more dangerous. From a stolen minivan, washed-up jazz bassist Leonard Noblac watches as Swaine begins to investigate. He's ready to perform his next crime to punish zeros in the soulless suburbs and happy to have Swaine in his audience. Used to working from the shadow at the back of the stage -- and drunk on waterless hand sanitizer -- Leonard intends to put down a throbbing beat of crime and destruction he hopes will make him famous: his perfect jazz album of felonies.

Bryan Gilmer has made his living as a writer for more than 15 years, working first as a night-shift crime reporter for a Southern newspaper before advancing to Florida's largest paper, the Pulitzer-prizewinning St. Petersburg Times. Now he teaches newswriting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and writes for institutional and corporate clients in addition to his fiction. He lives with his wife, Kelly, and their son, Quinn, in Durham, North Carolina.