IN PRINT

A former FBI agent and SWAT team member, Wes DeMott returns to Washington, D.C., in his second novel, "Vapors," a psychological thriller and love story about America's defense contractors and the dangerous territory beyond government oversight where secret policy is made.

The twisting tale begins when Peter Jamison, an aerospace engineer, discovers accounting fraud while trying to save his contract for a tactical weapons system. In an effort to save the job of his co-worker, he turns to Melissa Corley, an attorney with the Citizens' Coalition Against Government Waste and the object of his affection.

DeMott's story takes readers into the White House, a senator's office and the FBI. There are even mentions of Norfolk and Oceana Naval Air Station.

In reviewing "Vapors," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called DeMott "a writer to be watched!" His work, in fact, did catch the eye of the National Press Club, which invited DeMott to join Annie Proulx, Debra Norville, Jack Anderson, Col. David Hackworth and other American authors and celebrities at the recent 22nd Annual National Press Club Book Fair and Author Night, Washington's largest literary event.

Publisher's Weekly calls "Vapors" "a stylized, turn-on-a-dime crime story where the lines between love, murder and espionage are deftly blurred."

DeMott, himself, says of the book, "If you like to be surprised by an ending you know you should have seen coming, you'll love 'Vapors.' "

There is, in fact, a second surprise ending to "Vapors" - an ending in the sense that it does, indeed, come at the end of the book, but one that is also a beginning: the first 20 pages of "Heat Sync," DeMott's next political thriller due out this year.

In his third novel, "Daddy's Gone A-Hunting," mystery writer Robert Skinner returns to 1930s New Orleans and an underworld of crime, drugs and nightclubs.

Among his memorable characters is nightclub owner Wesley Farrell, a black man passing for white, whom he first introduced in his 1997 Anthony-nominated "Skin Deep, Blood Red," and Carol Donovan, a fellow club owner and seductress whose looks are "enough to make a Baptist minister drink swampwater, crawl inside a hollow log, and bay at the moon."

Reviewers and fellow writers have praised Skinner for his accurate depiction of Depression-era New Orleans. James Sallis, regarded as one of the more distinguished writers of detective fiction in America, says, "No one writes New Orleans better, or brings its strange history so to life."

Writing for The Book Report Inc., Sally Fellows notes of Skinner's latest work, "It challenges the reader to go into a time and place where most of us would be very uncomfortable. But the excursion is worth it, for the reader encounters an abundance of people who survive lives of privation and violence and do it with dignity and honor. In the end, it is a tribute to humanity."

Skinner weaves the strands of his vintage-style noir tale together in such a way that keeps the pages turning. He does extensive research for his novels by watching movies and reading books and magazines of the 1930s, and listening to the stories of people who lived during that period.

Skinner, also the author of "Cat-Eyed Trouble" (1998), is actually better known in academic circles for his nonfiction writing on the career of African-American novelist Chester Himes. Before turning to fiction five years ago, he wrote history and literary criticism for 15 years. Skinner lives in New Orleans, where he is university librarian at Xavier University of Louisiana. He was named to the 54th edition of "Who's Who in America for 2000."