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NIGHT WITHIN NIGHT
"How much trouble can $750 buy you? An awful lot, it would seem. Just ask Matt, the main character in Mark Roger's masterfully noirish Night within Night, a story of betrayal, sex, lies and finding love in all the wrong places-and paying for it, big time. Atmospheric with no let-up in the tension and drama, Night within Night is a totally captivating page-turner, relentlessly told at breakneck pace."
Sam Millar, international bestselling author of On The Brinks
1982, when clunky VHS tapes were on the scene and AIDS was just rearing its head. Matt is a family man living in Hoboken, right across the river from Manhattan. Matt's boiling over inside. His wife Gwen is beautiful and intelligent and distant. She's taking Matt's measure day by day and he's coming up short. Matt's two young kids charm him one minute and make him retreat into a mental bunker the next. In his 30s, Matt feels adrift.
A chance bit of business brings Matt a bonus from his boss. Not a lot of money-only $750-but enough to get him into trouble. Instead of running back to his wife with the cash, Matt stuffs it deep into his pocket and covers it with a white handkerchief. Matt's favorite daydream was traveling the world and bedding a woman from each country he visited. $750 wasn't the kind of stake he'd need for that adventure. Plan B, Matt decides he's going to seek out exotic whores in NYC-Black, Latina, Asian-until the bonus dries up.
... I wondered what it would be like to take a year off and travel around the world, bedding down a woman from each country. Fuck sightseeing. You can have the cathedrals and camel rides. I just wanted to seek out one exotic woman after another. But a trip like that would cost a fortune. There was nothing in my life that hinted at me ever having that kind of money.
The Times Square whores I saw every day looked about as exotic and far off as the South Bronx. They'd never be able to replace my daydreams of a night in an English girl's messy bedroom, a morning with a Venezuelan secretary, a stolen hour with a randy chambermaid in Bombay. The girls in these daydreams lead varied lives: students, workers, divorced moms. I wasn't so sure about whores. It seemed to me that whores would be the same around the world-coining money between their legs.
But I didn't have a year to travel, I didn't have a fortune.
All I had was $750.
One misadventure after another sends Matt spiraling into lies, dangerous sex, into an even deeper gulf between him and his wife. Things get even more tangled when Matt falls in love with a Korean whore from a midtown massage parlor. Matt begins to imagine he's the hero she's been waiting for.
Not even close.
"Mark Rogers knows that the stylish, polished picture frame in which we live is riddled with holes, in which worms live." James Sallis, author of Drive
"Koreatown Blues is a cleverly-plotted hard-boiled novel with crisp, muscular prose, a feverish pace, a vividly-drawn urban setting, and characters so real that Rudy Giuliani would stop and frisk them." Edgar award-winning author Bruce DeSilva
Koreatown Blues is an entertaining, fast-paced first novel, with an unexpected, up-to-date solution." Publishers Weekly
"Here is how we should judge good crime fiction. Imagine projecting yourself amid the endless rubble of a post-apocalyptic city into a former library. Amid the ruination certain works remain intact because they meet the criteria of good crime fiction... I have no doubt that sitting by Hammett's The Dain Curse, or Chandler's Red Wind, you'll see Mark Roger's Red Thread standing intact with them. In other words, this is a hell of a read from one of the best." Alexander McNealy
