The Cass Neary Crime NOvels
THE BOOK OF LAMPS AND BANNERS (CASS NEARY #4)
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COMING SEPTEMBER 29, 2020
Acclaimed crime writer Elizabeth Hand returns to her cult-favorite series: Photographer Cass Neary is hard-up for cash and in more danger than she realizes, in the hunt for an ancient, legendary book.
Cass Neary needs cash to get home to New York, and she's already sold her camera—like losing a limb, for a photographer of her experience. Her best chance is to get in on the deal that Griffin, an old flame, is about cut with a notoriously meticulous bookseller for a gorgeous, ancient illuminated manuscript: The Book of Lamps and Banners. This Book is more than just a beautiful object—its text and images are said to have a powerful magic capable of life-changing effects on anyone who reads it.
But before the sale can be completed, an intruder brazenly steals the Book out from under the dealer's nose. Cass and Griff are the only suspects. To clear their names, and keep the missing text out of dangerous hands, Cass plunges into a curious underworld at the intersection of antiquarian books, cutting-edge software, and modern nationalist politics. This breathless psychological thriller, featuring one of the greatest amateur sleuths of the past decade, could only come from the mind of Elizabeth Hand.
“Cass Neary is a tough, self-destructive character who still exudes compassion, courage, and love for the beauty and the pain of life—even more so because she recognizes its impermanence. Part The Club Dumas, part The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, all punk attitude and beautiful ache.”
“The ancient manuscript at the center of The Book of Lamps and Banners is as kaleidoscopic, dark, and mysterious as Hand’s amateur sleuth. This novel is a jaw-punch, written with a snarling grace. Cass Neary—the aging punk photographer living within darkest edges of our broken civilization-is my hero. And so is Liz Hand.”
“Brilliantly entertaining and surprisingly heart-wrenching... Pure triumph, from end to end.”
“What a story! Powered by pure adrenaline and excitement, engrossing and yet human to the core—Elizabeth Hand has written a barn burner of a thriller. What a delight.”
“Picture The Maltese Falcon, but instead of a black bird, there’s an ancient and mystic manuscript, and instead of a private eye with a code, there’s an aging punk photographer amped up on booze and speed. Elizabeth Hand’s genre mash-up is a dizzying ride.”
“A wild ride that defies comparison: pill-popping idealist Cass Neary’s obsessive hunt piles on teeth-grinding, story-propelling tension, and Hand’s gifted portrayal of subcultures seamlessly links Cass’ past in New York’s ’80s punk scene, London’s rare-book dealers, and Odinist neo-Nazis.”
“I love Cass Neary, the smart, messy, substance-abusing, death-marked ghost of punk. Her latest misadventure is vivid and haunting, braiding the ancient and occult with the unholy frights of the modern world. A thrill ride crackling with sulfurous brilliance.”
“A propulsive exploration of obsession and addiction.”
“If Dan Brown wrote The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you’d have something like Elizabeth Hand’s The Book of Lamps and Banners. A tight, gritty page-turner that gnaws at your fingertips and gets under your skin — the best kind of addiction.”
“It’s hard to imagine a more perfect novel than The Book of Lamps and Banners. In her fourth Cass Neary outing, Elizabeth Hand has delivered a startling book that is dirty, wise, aching, and almost magical. Hand expertly marries muscular prose to sophisticated detail, resulting in an enviably smart, fearless novel that conjures demons, evokes an immediate sense of place, and summons the surreal.”
Hard Light (cASS NEARY #3)
As her passionately devoted fans know, Elizabeth Hand is a uniquely gifted storyteller. Her iconoclastic series of crime novels which features offbeat photographer Cass Neary, began with the underground classic Generation Loss, and that was followed by the brilliant Available Dark. Katherine Dunne, author of Geek Love, describes Cass as “one of literature’s great noir antiheroes,” and comparisons to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander abound.
As the story opens, Cass arrives in London where she meets and is reunited with her long-lost lover, Quinn O’Boyle, who is wanted by both Interpol and the Russian mob. When Quinn then fails to show at their rendezvous point, Cass is fearful she’ll be the next to disappear, and she goes on the run.
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“Like the chilling female characters of Tana French or Gillian Flynn, Elizabeth Hand’s smart Cassandra Neary will freeze your blood and set your imagination ablaze. I dare you to close your eyes on Hard Light.”
“Brilliant! A punk-scene runaway train. Welcome to Liz Hand. Buy this book.”
“Hand’s supernaturally inflected Cass Neary crime novels make mincemeat out of the assumption—still held by many an unwary reader—that mysteries are mere diversions, designed to pass an empty hour and then be forgotten. No way that’s true of “Hard Light”: This third novel in the Cass Neary series fades away as stubbornly as a bloodstain.”
“London’s calling Cass Neary in this addictive novel that brings the sordid glories of the Seventies arts scene into the hard light of today. Whip smart and pitch perfect, it jangled my bones.”
“Cass conveys an expert’s knowledge of the 1970s East Village punk scene, Iron Age rituals, Paleolithic icons, and the intricacies of photography and film noir … Gripping.”
Other Covers (click to enlarge)
Interviews & Reviews
The Nerdy Book Fairy: Elizabeth Hand Talks About Art, Artists, Cass Neary & More In Our Interview
Available Dark (cASS nEARY #2)
As this riveting tour-de-force opens, the police already want to talk to Cass about a mysterious death she was involved with previously, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer from overseas and hops on a plane.
In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavik, in search of a lover from her own dark past.
But when the fashion photographer’s mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness. In Available Dark, the eagerly awaited sequel to the award-winning Generation Loss, Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it’s always darkest before it turns completely black.
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“Elizabeth Hand’s prose is a wiry, intelligent force that ranges from blunt athleticism to fluid luminosity... Ferocious, aching with compassion and cruelly brilliant, Available Dark is a sinful pleasure.”
“Implacable beauty amid carnage and decay, waste and loss: that’s the potent allure of the Cass Neary novels and their aching, persistent heroine.”
“Available Dark works well as a thriller, but it’s Cass who makes the book extraordinary. It’s rare to find a strong female character—especially a middle-aged one—who likes sex and drinking and drugs and doesn’t feel the need to apologize about it. ”
Other Covers (click to enlarge)
Generation Loss (cASS nEARY #1)
Cass Neary made her name in the seventies as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and the hangers-on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, earned her a brief moment of fame. Thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out when an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Down East, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and she finds one final shot at redemption. Patricia Highsmith meets Patti Smith in this mesmerizing literary thriller.
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“Brilliantly written and completely original, Hand’s novel is an achievement with a capital A.”
“Intense and atmospheric, Generation Loss is an inventive brew of postpunk attitude and dark mystery. Elizabeth Hand writes with craftsmanship and passion.””
“Although Generation Loss moves like a thriller, it detonates with greater resound. It’s a dark and beautiful novel.”
Other Covers (click to enlarge)
Interviews & Reviews
Bookslut: An Interview with Elizabeth Hand