Border City Blues 2-Book Bundle: Riverside Drive / Maiden Lane

By Michael Januska

Prohibition means two things in the Border city of Windsor, Ontario: big business, and big trouble.

Riverside Drive
Jack McCloskey returned to Windsor, Ontario, from the Great War lost in a battle with his inner demons. When he channels his energy into amateur fights, he's noticed by a gangster moonlighting as a boxing promoter. After a brief professional stint, Jack is invited to join the crew in the early days of Prohibition along the Detroit River.

Maiden Lane
It's the winter of 1923 and the border towns are under a deep freeze. As if the police didn't have their hands full, drug-smuggling, human trafficking, and a grisly find in the river steer them into unfamiliar territory, and a whisper of the occult brings a wholly unexpected twist.

Includes

• Riverside Drive
• Maiden Lane

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781459732605

Michael Januska

Michael Januska has worked with books his whole life, both as a bookseller and for several publishing companies. Stories from Januska’s Prohibition-era Border City Blues novels have won two consecutive Scene of the Crime short story prizes. He is also the author of Grey Cup Century. He lives in Toronto.

Book preview

Reviews for Border City Blues 2-Book Bundle

[darcia_10 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the author's writing style, but had major issues with the story's execution. I just could not find a foothold. From the opening chapter, I felt lost, like I'd stepped into the middle of a movie - or, actually, a few movies combined.Right from the beginning, we have an onslaught of characters. There is no character development and I had absolutely no sense of who these people were. I wasn't even clear on what they were doing. We jump from that first bunch of characters over to a new batch of characters doing something else entirely, and there I was equally confused. I was about 1/3 through this book before anything started to connect and make the least bit of sense to me. Even then, the coherence came in bits scattered along the way.The plot feels both vague and tangled. There is a lot going on, but I had trouble connecting the immediate action with the content as a whole. The setting is also problematic. While the author does a great job describing individual buildings and rooms where the action takes place, these buildings and rooms could have been anywhere at all. I was rarely clear on which border city I was in at any given time. In fairness, I did not read the first book in this series and I don't know how much, if at all, that matters here. It might be that this book does not work well as a stand-alone read. *I was given an advanced review copy by Dundurn via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.*