Bruen, Coleman to team on Tower

Busted Flush Press is busting out of reprints for its first original novel, and it’s a big-time announcement: A new novel from Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman. The press, started in 2005 as a reprint press to rescue “fine thrillers and hard-boiled crime fiction,” has published original short fiction before with its Damn-Near Dead and A Hell of a Woman anthologies. With Tower, it not only issues its first original novel, but does so with two of the crime fiction genre’s best.

Busted Flush has a relationship with both authors. Bruen’s early work was issued in an omnibus, A Fifth of Bruen, in 2006, while two of Coleman’s Moe Prager series — Walking the Perfect Square and Redemption Street – have been reprinted by the press. A third, The James Deans, is due soon.

According to Busted Flush, the new Bruen-Coleman novel is “steeped in metaphysics, baseball, and brutality,” and tells of “two low-level wiseguys with little ambition and even less of a future (who) become major players in the potential destruction of an international crime syndicate.”

The only bad news in the announcement: Eager readers must wait until fall 2009 to get a copy.