we’ve never seen through the eyes of a sleuth unlike any we’ve ever met. “In SCAVENGER, Christopher Chambers shows us a Washington D.C. a 21st-century twist on traditional hardboiled noir.” - Publishers Weekly SCAVENGER: A Novel, by Christopher Chambers Trade Paper 266 pages ISBN: 978-1-94 $16 October 13, 2020, Three Rooms Press Dickie Cornish is a new kind of detective: one who is a street-wise local and a neophyte detective, learning to play a new game as it unfolds. It is layered with characters whose damage outlines why they love, lose, double-cross, and even kill. SCAVENGER is a 21st century take on the noir, hardboiled tales of the 20th, with both bleak and colorful backdrops in the nation’s capital of today. In his achingly amateur role as sleuth and guardian, Dickie must quell his demons and use his scavenger skills and street smarts to deny Bracht his prize…and save himself from the big frame-up. In return, Bracht promises Dickie a fresh, clean start at a new life.īefore long, Dickie discovers that the woman he is supposed to locate guards another treasure that Bracht will stop at nothing-even murder-to retrieve.

In fury, he attacks the local cops, lands in jail, then is plucked out by Bracht, who has a job for him: find a woman using the sub-level network of the streets and the underground world of undocumented immigrants. But his joy is short-lived, when he simultaneously finds out that two of his friends who escaped the shelters for a decent life have been murdered. On one expedition Dickie gets lucky as he uncovers a treasure in the trash of a wealthy ex-Homeland Security Secretary, Jamie Bracht. He makes a few dollars a day turning the possessions of evicted tenants into curb flotsam, scavenging what he can from the wreckage of other lives to save his. Addled by the K2 and liquor he prays will blunt the pain of a harsh winter, he endures the cruelty of Donald Trump’s capital and ongoing nightmares from his youth. In SCAVENGER, the forthcoming novel from Christopher Chambers (A Prayer for Deliverance and Sympathy for the Devil) street-wise survivor Dickie Cornish lives in a homeless camp near the Smithsonian’s Museum of National History. world of unscrupulous politicians and desperate street hustlers where everything is on the line. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Awardĭickie Cornish, a street-wise neophyte Black sleuth, must learn to navigate a high stakes game of greed, deceit, and murder in a perilous Washington, D.C. Two thumbs up for Chambers!” -Tracy Clark, author of Borrowed Time, winner of the G.P. “Chambers comes out of the box swinging hard in this fast-moving, down-and-dirty crime novel that kicks up the tarp on the sleazy, duplicitous, double-dealing underbelly of our nation’s capital. “Literary cinema verite, Chambers delivers a sly, slick and twisty hardcore mystery well worth the read.” -Gary Phillips, author, Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem Cosby author, My Darkest Prayer and Blacktop Wasteland “Chris Chambers has created a wholly original character that exists in a world at once familiar but startlingly brutal.” -S.

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