From Fish Wrap To Hardcover

Chris Goffard, a recent Pulitzer finalist for a St. Petersburg Times series called The $40 Lawyer, just had his first novel, Snitch Jacket, published in the U.S. (It's been out in Great Britain for a while.) It's a real quick read, and some passages, like this one, jump right off the page:



So I was on my way to work, gliding down the hill out of Costa Mesa toward Pacific Coast Highway, and beyond it I could see the long silent blue of the Pacific, looking so big and friendly from this distance that it was possible to forget the sea was really a great salty puddle waiting to be nudged by an earthquake or asteroid into an annihilating hiccup. It gave me pleasure to think of the sea someday…