Gibson House Press

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay hits the backroads with singer-songwriter Rudy Pauver as he navigates a conflicted relationship with a successful protégé and the unexpected arrival of his spirited young niece.

In the doldrums of a career as a cult figure, Rudy has been overshadowed by Ryan Orland, to the point where Rudy is now identified as an imitator of the younger man. Ryan is generous and supportive, but Rudy finds it hard to be grateful, especially as a sordid confrontation results in their estrangement. When his sister’s daughter, a teenage runaway, turns up asking to join him on the road, Rudy has to come to terms with the limits of his ambition and the nature of his obligation to family.

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain is an exploration of the nature of creativity and popular success; artistic and ethical influence; the pathos of the middle-aged artist; changing standards of sexual morality; and guilt and penance in a post-religious society.

Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

Named one of Rolling Stone's "Best Music Books of 2021."

Eleanor is bored with her two sons and a husband who ignores her when she reconnects with Phil, a man she knew in high school. Phil's wife is leaving him because of his philandering, most recently with the younger Sarayu. Eleanor's friend Kaye doesn't approve of Phil, but she has her own problems: too much drinking and a fraught relationship with her husband and daughter, who are building a boat together.

Poignant and acutely observed, We Have Everything Before Us is unsparing yet sympathetic as it details the unsettling junction of illusions and reality.

Howard Wright finds his skin turning transparent, revealing the bloody workings of musculature beneath. His body becomes otherworldly and insistent, spinning him into visions that echo trauma from his childhood.

Sarah Turnsfield is living under an assumed identity, on the run from her past as a meteoric scientific prodigy. Content to work as a grocery clerk, she is determined to live a life on her own terms, where the landscape of her mind is hers alone.

Jo Breckmier seeks a new start in Duluth after a bitter divorce. She moves into the apartment unit across from Howard’s, leaning on alcohol and a stubborn will to reinvent herself. The woods and the lake seem to call to her as she laments her shipwrecked life.

When instinct, the swiftly warming spring, and Howard’s monstrous body conspire to bring the three together, each will discover how long they can hide—Jo from her loneliness, Sarah from her rising paranoia, and Howard from his intensifying transformation.

On one remarkable night along the rugged shore of Lake Superior, the lines between reality and legend intersect. Identities are broken and remade.

In this contemporary monster story, the earth itself amplifies both the grotesque and the beautiful.

Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

A progressive, alternative university is targeted for takeover by conservative forces in this satiric tale. 

Aaron Motherway is a Hollywood screenwriter who, while recovering from a traffic accident, is tapped to run the arts program at Parami University, located in Pearl Handle, Wyoming.

What Aaron doesn’t know is that he is being set up to fail by various duplicitous forces, and he finds himself immersed in a culture war infused with sexual misconduct, embezzlement, political opportunism, and potential mass murder, played out in a climate of comedic dysfunction and absurdity.

His charming and able assistant has his back, fending off a demented poet and venomous colleagues. And he gains the loyalty of some very challenged students—a murderer, a lobster wrangler, and an apostate.

But there are surprises in store for Aaron before the story reaches a dramatic conclusion.

Buddha Was a Cowboy is a metaphor for many of the issues engulfing and dividing America today, and a darkly humorous take on the current cultural landscape.

In 1960s Brazil, an indigenous group is on the brink of a tragedy, the dimensions of which they are only beginning to grasp. A small band of disaffected government agents, academics and visionaries is determined to fight for their cause. Among them is James Ardmore who, along with his nephew Larry, travels to Pahquel, a village in the crosshairs of an environmental showdown.

When James dies en route, Larry is left to decide: Should he attempt to escape his own personal demons by immersing himself in a completely foreign culture? Or retreat and resume his disaffected life in the U.S.? What costs will he bear if he chooses to press forward?

Against a lush backdrop, the author gives voice to the complexities of social, anthropological and environmental forces. This is a page-turner of an adventure story that rests upon the deep and unsettling layers of undergrowth.

Tomas lives in an apartment above the bike shop owned by his father, Ernst Zimmermann, a war refugee from Germany and a former professional bike racer who is escaping a life of bitter disappointment.

Through high school graduation and over a last summer at home on an island in Lake Superior, Tomas keeps company with Grey and Callie, his best friends since childhood, as they contemplate what will happen next.

In the fall, Tomas leaves the island of Saint Raphael, where he has lived since age of six, and heads south by bike toward an uncertain future.

At school Tom is befriended by a charismatic history professor and through him meets the members of an eccentric guerilla theater group, who are in the midst of a bold theatrical production. As Simple Machines approaches a climax, Grey and Callie reappear with trouble of their own, and Tom is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends and father at home and the college world in which he feels a new sense of belonging.

Set in the late ’70s, A Girl Called Sidney: The Coldest Place by rock musician Courtney Yasmineh is a searing, nerve-rattling story of a mature 17-year-old whose family disintegrates in spectacular fashion in affluent suburban Chicago.

After first spiriting her mother away and then running away herself to the family’s remote Northwoods cabin in Minnesota, Sidney challenges herself to survive alone and find her voice over the course of a brutal winter.

The narrative takes the reader on a dark and moody ride back and forth in both time and place, between Chicago and a tiny rural town. Getting inside Sidney’s head as she tries to make sense of a cast of characters – family, hangers-on, and old and new friends – the novel examines the roots of their dysfunction while Sidney plots the future and works to make real her pursuit of music, inspired by the music of Bob Dylan

With appeal to readers of the recent rash of women rocker bios – and contemporary fiction of the heartland – the story looks with a fresh perspective back to a distinct time and the experiences of a young woman that will resonate with many adults.

It’s December 1954. During a live television performance of the General Electric Theater, a young James Dean brandishes a pistol at fellow actor (and weekly show-host) Ronald Reagan. Dean goes off script, and what happens next kicks off a noirish alternate history, a “sliding doors” narrative that takes real events in a different direction.

The Cold Last Swim features two cultural icons: one who would be dead within a year, immortalized as a symbol of cool rebellion; the other, in a little over a quarter century, would become leader of the free world, the standard bearer of traditional and even fundamentalist values. Each reflects fifties America: Reagan is firmly established among the open freeways and unblemished skies of sunny Los Angeles; Jimmy, emerging from the black-and-white shadows of a rainy New York street.

Told largely from Jimmy's viewpoint, but incorporating a diverse cast of period characters, The Cold Last Swim is classical Greek drama: Reagan's Apollo, god of light, warmth, and temperance; Jimmy's Bacchus, license, alienation, and impulse. In this era between the mid-fifties and mid-sixties, we recognize the seeds are being sown for the cultural gulf that divides America today.

Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

Tom is a wealthy Chicago businessman with too much time on his hands, a man who “displayed impeccable manners and looked earnestly concerned when he had to,” one who “had taken no chances.” Keith is close to homeless and adrift somewhere in northern Michigan. They were friends once, two decades ago, in a working-class Scottish town brought vividly to life in a series of evocative flashbacks.

Now the search to find one brings life-affirming purpose to the other, and Tom will stop at nothing to find his friend and discover the truth behind his disappearance.

An intuition of impending danger proves to be frighteningly accurate as a small lakeside town grudgingly reveals its dark underbelly, in this debut crime novel that Booklist calls “taut . . . captivating . . . skillfully written, and . . . deeply satisfying.”

In Mission, Peter Robertson’s sequel to his debut novel, the precarious world of a Colorado mountain town’s homeless population becomes a focus for a semi-retired businessman and a victim pool for a driven killer.

A decade and a half after finding death and deceit in Northern Michigan in the previous Permafrost, Tom has divorced and relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and has given up the reins of his lucrative business interests to his long-suffering employee Nye Prior for a life of craft beer and bicycling. He isn’t necessarily any richer or happier, but he’s certainly older and fitter.

On an early morning ride, Tom sees a young man pulled from flooded Boulder Creek. The death isn’t so very unusual. In fact another man who was homeless drowned in the creek the month previous. The Boulder cops have certainly seen it before. But Tom hasn’t, and the instincts that drove Tom far north of Chicago in the previous book kick in with a vengeance, and he’s soon riding the creek paths with a whole new purpose: to find the killer before the next deadly spring flood arrives.

Fifteen years have softened the yuppie heart of Tom. He’s lost most of his prized possessions and opted for a simpler life. He’s also looking for love, and he finds a librarian who likes to bike, and, more importantly, isn’t averse to helping out with the sleuthing chores. In addition, Tom befriends Reggie Hawkins, a Boulder cop with a secret life. Tom is determined to find a killer. Nye is determined to brew the perfect stout, and fans of Permafrost will once again discover a potent brew of rich characterization and tense plot in this second in a projected trilogy of Tom novels.

The journey begins in the suburbs of Chicago. An impulsive act of theft coincides with a gentle and inexplicable death. A long drive south to Louisiana follows the trail of an obscure folk singer, drowned years back in trusted waters. And before all the connections between the two deaths can be revealed, a series of hunches will lead Tom to some dark and depressing truths about the nature of fandom and the fallibility of instincts.

In the previous Permafrost and Mission, Tom was hopelessly underemployed and terminally listless. As an occasional businessman, he easily found time to track down several killers in Michigan and Colorado, respectively. In this third and final work in the series, Tom is determined to find the link between a young fan’s death in the present day, and an older singer’s decline and death in New Orleans in the confusing aftermath of Katrina.

Colorblind looks at the city of New Orleans through the eyes of a seasoned tourist and explores music both as a means of salvation and a road to obsession. Tom finds the connection between the two deaths easily enough. The tougher question of why the connection exists is harder to answer. In the hunt for answers, Tom rediscovers his own love of music, his suppressed vulnerability and the realization that, this time around, not all his hunches are good ones.

Permafrost was greeted by ALA Booklist as “a strong opening act,” while Mission was hailed as “a successful follow up.” Bestselling author Doug Stanton (In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers) praised both books as a “superbly smart and addictive series.”

Colorblind brings Tom’s journey to a close, with taut crime detailing, vivid local color, and the astute character observation that fans of the first two books have come to expect from this author.

The Town Crazy, set in the sleepy town of Hanzloo, Pennsylvania, a suburban Catholic community in 1961, is a novel of passion, absurdity, innocence, and sorrow.

A single father moves into town with his young son, which arouses suspicion from the husbands and the interest of the wives, but at the same time one of the wives seems to be losing her mind, and no one knows what to do.

A contemporary, often humorous take on a bygone era, The Town Crazy also delves into the terror and cruelty of childhood, the dangerous loneliness of failing marriages, sexual repression and desire, and the intersection of art and religion, all culminating in a tragedy for which everyone in the town bears some responsibility.

Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

Colin Tugdale is scheduled to die. His beloved wife, Ruby, already has. He took the government money and enjoyed his last twenty years in perfect health, never aging a day, never getting sick.

With one year left, little to lose, and suspicions about the integrity of the program, Colin begins a race against time. Can he find out why some people are still alive when they shouldn’t be, and how the woman who enters his life has saved herself from an incurable disease?

Colin goes looking for answers and crosses paths with a killer in this tense and thought-provoking tale.