The Lost Coast

registration.
    “How do you like that,” he said. “Your name really is Seth. And now I know where you live, too. So God help you if I ever hear of a fag beating anywhere near the Lost Coast.”
    “You won’t,” Seth said. “I promise.”
    Larison wondered. “Get out of the car,” he said. “I’m going to drive it back into town. I’ll leave it near the plaza somewhere. You’ll have to look around, but you’ll find it. The keys will be under the front driver-side tire.”
    The kid got out of the car and stood there, looking confused and afraid and forlorn. Larison slid over to the driver’s seat. He turned the key and the engine coughed to life.
    He reached for the door handle and looked at the kid. “If I ever,” he said again. In the circles he was accustomed to, threats made you sound weak. But the kid wasn’t of that world.
    The kid shook his head quickly. “I won’t. I won’t.”
    Larison pulled the door shut and drove off.
    Four minutes later, he was back in his car, the surfaces he’d touched in Seth’s Corolla all wiped down. Two minutes after that, he was back on the Redwood Highway, heading toward the Oregon border, the redwoods dense and shadowy to his right, the Lost Coast disappearing like a dream behind him.
    He wondered whether he’d straightened the kid out, whether by fear or by shock. He wondered whether the kid would get over it, and wind up in another bar somewhere, flashing another lonely guy that same, beautiful smile.
    He decided no. Because that smile was never going to be the same. It was lost now, like Larison himself.

    sponsored by www.boox.to

the detachment
a john rain thriller
    John Rain is back. And “the most charismatic assassin since James Bond”
(San Francisco Chronicle)
is up against his most formidable enemy yet: the nexus of political, military, media, and corporate factions known only as the Oligarchy.
    When legendary black ops veteran Colonel Scott “Hort” Horton tracks Rain down in Tokyo, Rain can’t resist the offer: a multi-million dollar payday for the “natural causes” demise of three ultra-high-profile targets who are dangerously close to launching a coup in America.
    But the opposition on this job is going to be too much for even Rain to pull it off alone. He’ll need a detachment of other deniable irregulars: his partner, the former Marine sniper, Dox. Ben Treven, a covert operator with ambivalent motives and conflicted loyalties. And Larison, a man with a hair trigger and a secret he’ll kill to protect.
    From the shadowy backstreets of Tokyo and Vienna, to the deceptive glitz and glamour of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and finally to a Washington, D.C. in a permanent state of war, these four lone wolf killers will have to survive presidential hit teams, secret CIA prisons, and a national security state as obsessed with guarding its own secrets as it is with invading the privacy of the populace.
    But first, they’ll have to survive each other.
    The Detachment
is what fans of Eisler, “one of the most talented and literary writers in the thriller genre” (
Chicago Sun-Times
), have been waiting for: the worlds of the award-winning Rain series, and of the bestselling
Fault Line
and
Inside Out
, colliding in one explosive thriller as real as today’s headlines and as frightening as tomorrow’s.
    Buy
The Detachment
today!

q & a
j.a. konrath interviews barry eisler
    Joe: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe The Lost Coast is your very first short story. Why haven’t you visited this form before?
    Barry: Because you’ve never suggested it to me, you bastard.
    Kidding, obviously — my reluctance has been despite your frequent blandishments, and I’m glad you finally got through to me. I think there were a number of factors. The thought of appearing in an anthology or magazine never really excited me that much, even though an anthology or magazine placement could be a good advertisement for a novel. And probably I was a little afraid to try my hand at the new form (though now that I have, I think I must have been crazy. Short stories are a blast to write). In the end, I think it was the combination of knowing I could reach the huge new audience digital publishing has made possible and make money doing it. Plus you just wore me down.
    Joe: I really liked the Larison character in Inside Out. Though he’s one of the antagonists in that book, I wouldn’t actually label him a villain. He’s more of an anti-hero, sort of a darker,