Jess Walter

In Over Tumbled Graves, Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of Citizen Vince and The Zero, confronts our fascination with pathology and murder. A thriller of extraordinary depth and dimension, Over Tumbled Graves follows Caroline Mabry, a Spokane police detective searching for a serial murderer.

The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller. From its opening scene-when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head-novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping,...

On the last hot day of summer in 1992, gunfire cracked over a rocky knob in northern Idaho, just south of the Canadian border. By the next day three people were dead, and a small war was joined, pitting the full might of federal law enforcement against one well-armed family. Drawing on extensive interviews with Randy Weaver's family, government insiders, and others, Jess Walter traces the paths that led the Weavers to their confrontation with federal...

"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....

"We all live like we're famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don't want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father...

Living in Spokane, Washington, under the Witness Protection Program, small-time hood Vince Camden leads a quiet existence among his new friends: local criminals, prostitutes and other social outcasts. By day he makes donuts and reads the beginnings of books to impress the cute blonde who comes into his shop every morning. In his spare time though, he runs a lucrative credit card scam. But everything spirals out of control when a mobster from back...

A collection of the year's best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha.