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Smoke and Bourbon: A Jack Delaney Novella
Paperback
Series: The Cold Drawer
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 16 2026
Pages: 86
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The war is still ringing in his ears only the battlefield had shifted from the Pacific to the streets of post war LA.
The first entry in an exciting new series. The Cold Drawer serves as the department's administrative graveyard. It's that rusted, unnamed filing cabinet tucked away in the squad room bullpen where inconvenient truths go to die.When the precinct or the city's power players want a case buried-whether it's an unsolved murder that hits too close to home, a high-profile missing person, or evidence of systemic corruption-the file gets tossed in there, completely erased from the official books.
For Jack Delaney, the cold drawer is a constant, physical reminder of the department's cynicism. It symbolizes the city's forgotten casualties and the deliberate silencing of the truth he's constantly fighting against.
Detective Jack Delaney has a badge, a bottle, and a debt he's been paying in blood since 1946. The artillery still roars in his skull. His marriage is gone.. And the only honest thing left in a city built on lies is the sound of a war he can't escape
For years, Delaney has kept his hands clean the only way he knows how - by signing the lies that keep the department dirty. Under Lieutenant Briggs' thumb, that's survival. But when his partner Sal starts pulling at the threads of a starlet's so-called suicide - a case Delaney buried with his own signature, bought by studio money - the debt comes due in a wet alley in Hollywood. Now Delaney must fight dark mafia secrets, the studio kickbacks and the corrupt machine that owns his badge. While the war trauma eats through what's left of his sanity. Los Angeles is cold, corrupt, and running on other people's silence. But Detective Jack Delaney is about to discover that the only way to stop the gears is to get his hands covered in blood. A razor-sharp hard-boiled detective novella set in 1940s Hollywood noir - for readers of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James Ellroy. If you love morally complex detectives, post-war LA crime fiction, and noir thrillers that don't flinch, Jack Delaney is waiting for you in the rain. → Scroll up and grab your copy of Smoke and Bourbon today.M.G. Phillips is a devotee of the American hardboiled tradition, channeling the bleak fatalism of Dashiell Hammett and the poetic cynicism of Raymond Chandler. An exhaustive study of 1940s Los Angeles-its architecture, its politics, and its raw desperation-serves as the grim backdrop for his debut novel, Smoke and Bourbon. He specializes in the kind of shadows the city refuses to acknowledge.
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