Ben East Books

Grid of posts 2×3

  • Shortlisted for International Book Prize

    The Dundee International Book Prize announced their short list for 2014.  Sea Never Dry, my novel about dirty cops and drug trafficking in West Africa, made the list.  Thick with spies and fetish priests, Internet fraudsters and the Ghanaian orphans turning a buck on Accra’s e-waste ash heaps, Sea Never Dry centers on the conflict between Western development efforts and… Read more

  • Crime Novel Review – Under A Russian Heaven

    Laurence Walker’s debut novel opens on a high wire between the noir and the literary. Here’s an obviously talented writer with an instinct for giving and withholding detail, at once building and satisfying tension. His technique hints at a pulse just below the surface, something buried alive beneath layers of detail, which the author promises… Read more

  • Crime Novel Review – The Carrier

    Preston Lang’s discreetly funny debut crime novel The Carrier is an amoral story about semi-decent, semi-depraved, mostly-human people who eat and argue and screw genuinely enough as they pursue their proverbial pot of gold in parts unknown of the U.S.A. Some get what they got coming, some get less, others more, but always around the corner is another day… Read more

  • ONE DEAD COP

    Taillights cut a pool of red in the dark where three African heavies in police uniform manned the makeshift roadblock.  A fourth figure loomed over the driver-side door two cars up.  The cops held their rifles clumsily.  Probably they were cops, Raines thought. Criminals in the West African Republic handled weapons better than the police… Read more

  • Prohibition

    The idea is to write a story in 100 words flat. The boys weren’t allowed to have guns.  But they wanted to play gangster, so Howard cut rifles out of cardboard. “We want pistols,” 5-year-old Mickey said. “And Uzis,” said Danny, age 3. Howard, who watched many movies with pistols and Uzis while the boys’… Read more

  • Review (Honduras) – Paradise in Front of Me

    Paradise in Front of Me – Realizing Life’s Beauty in an Unexpected Place – by Kevin G. Finch (Honduras 2004–06) The recurring image in Kevin G. Finch’s Paradise in Front of Me is that of an impoverished Honduran child looking up at a locked schoolhouse door. Shut out again. The author and the residents of El Paraíso repeatedly find… Read more