Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Crime & mystery fiction

ANOTHER DAY'S PAIN

K.C. Constantine

K.C. Constantine returns with the long-awaited final chapter of his saga of the Rocksburg Police Department.

The police force of Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, doesn't see a ton of action. With jobs and industry moving away from the small city outside Pittsburgh, Detective Ruggiero "Rugs" Carlucci's greatest adversaries are his negligent vacation-prone fellow officers and an older divorcee who has a habit of dancing naked on her back porch when she stops taking her medication. Retirement is on the horizon for Rugs, and the Vietnam vet is counting the days until he can move on from the job. But Rocksburg isn't going to let Rugs drift off to retirement without a fight. Before he can neatly wrap up his career, Rugs will face a mad shooter, a vengeful city councilman, and, most perilously, his own mother. With a supporting cast of characters painted through uproarious profanity and heart-wrenching confessions, Another Day's Pain is a bold and darkly funny novel about crime and the damaged souls it leaves behind. K.C. Constantine chronicled the fictional city of Rocksburg for fifty years, delighting readers with tales of Mario Balzic and the hapless Rocksburg Police Department. Another Day's Pain, completed shortly before the author's death, is the final chapter in that saga.

Available products
Book Published 2024-04-16 by Mysterious Press

Comments

Decades of unresolved trauma power the deeply moving, posthumously published final Rocksburg procedural (after 2002's Saving Room for Dessert) from Constantine (19342023). Constantine ends the long-running series on a high note, striking an elegaic tone that never tilts into triteness. Here's hoping this graceful final act will spark new interest in an unsung master of crime fiction.

Right up there with early George V. Higgins and recent Elmore Leonard.

We all have favorites, and K.C. Constantine was one of my mine. He was a talent and a pleasure and a comfort. His prose was quiet but had momentum, and his characters became richer and richer as the pages turned. Constantine had clear eyes and a heart and a lot of books worth reading.

Constantine's final book begins as a cop procedural and ends somewhere else entirely - as a book that locates the pain in its protagonist and then increases the pressure. A surprising and worthy capstone to the Rocksburg canon.

Dark, funny, razor-sharp, and searching, just the way I like it. It got me hungry to dig back through his entire catalogue. The comparisons to Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, and Ed McBain are apt.

A compelling story that gradually engulfs the reader [and] a fitting tribute to a great and ferocious talent who was unjustly ignored.