Robin Yocum

After his unspectacular professional baseball career ends with a knee injury in Toledo, Ohio, Johnny Earl gets busted for selling cocaine. After serving seven years in prison, all he wants to do is return to his hometown of Steubenville, retrieve the drug money he stashed before he went to jail, and start a new life where no one has ever heard of Johnny Earl. However, before he can leave town with his money, Johnny is picked up for questioning in the murder of Rayce Daubner, the FBI informant who had set him up on drug charges in the first place. Then his former prison cellmate shows up--a white supremacist who wants the drug money to help fund an Aryan nation in the wilds of Idaho. Five memorable characters, each with a separate agenda, come together in this layered tale of murder, deceit, and political intrigue.

A Welcome Murder

“Yocum writes like the reporter he used to be. He's observant andstill has his eye for detail and nuance.”—RichmondTimes-Dispatch

A Novel

The Essay

Kristen Lepionka

Lee Martin

Julia Keller

Yolonda Tonette Sanders

O-H-Oh-No! Fourteen storytellers reveal a gritty side to C-Bus in this collection of crime tales. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. With stories by: Lee Martin, Robin Yocum, Kristen Lepionka, Craig McDonald, Chris Bournea, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Tom Barlow, Mercedes King, Daniel Best, Laura Bickle, Yolonda Tonette Sanders, Julia Keller, Khalid Moalim, and Nancy Zafris. Praise for Columbus Noir “Moments of humanity shine through in many of the tales in this collection, and epic takes on pride and greed make many of the stories in this collection go beyond small miseries into the realm of Shakespearian tragedy. Urgent, beautiful, and not to be missed.” —CrimeReads, included in CrimeReads’ Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020 “This superior Akashic noir anthology gathers 14 dark snapshots of Ohio’s capital, a very dangerous place indeed, with heavy drug use and murder touching down everywhere, from the German Village neighborhood to the statehouse. One highlight is Craig McDonald’s “Curb Appeal,” one of several invoking the homicidal search for housing. In the editor’s effective “Going Places,” a security man who covers up affairs for the governor gets pulled into a murder plot . . . . Noir fans should be well satisfied.” —Publishers Weekly

Columbus Noir

"In the summer of 1967, Travis Baron and his best friend begin to unravel a mystery almost two decades old about the death of Amanda Baron-the mother that Travis never knew"--

A Brilliant Death

"A local basketball star in a small Ohio town tries to remake his life in middle age, but instead must confront a murderer and the prospect of leaving his hometown and giving up everything that once gave his life meaning. Nicholas "Duke" Ducheski is the most important man in the eastern Ohio steel town of Mingo Junction. Nearly two decades after he made the winning shot in the state championship basketball game, he remains much adored and the focal point of community pride. Hardly a day passes when someone doesn't want to talk about "the game." Now approaching forty, Duke no longer wants to be defined solely by something he did when he was eighteen. So he decides to parlay his local popularity into a successful restaurant--"Duke's Place."But no sooner does he get his restaurant up and running than disaster strikes. One day, "Little Tony" DeMarco, his brother-in-law and a known mob enforcer, comes into the restaurant and murders Duke's oldest friend. Now Duke faces the hardest decision of his life. DeMarco thinks he's untouchable, but Duke discovers a way to take him down, along with his mob superiors. To do so, however, means leaving Mingo Junction and sacrificing his treasured identity as the town legend. And if he follows through, what will remain of his life?"--

"A local basketball star in a small Ohio town tries to remake his life in middle age, but instead must confront a murderer and the prospect of leaving his hometown and giving up everything that once gave his life meaning"--

a novel

A perfect shot

During the four-plus years that Robin Yocum was the police reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, he covered more than 1,000 deaths. Some were flukes; some were deserved. He interviewed decorated cops and transvestites, pimps, prostitutes, and pushers, killers, and child molesters. He went on drug, porn, and moonshine raids. He waded through cornfields looking for missing planes and children, a county landfill in a vain search for child pornography, through a squalid home with knee-high trash and a flooded basement where a family of ducks had taken up residence. He ruined so many slacks and shoes that he began wearing Sansabelt and cowboy boots because he needed something he could hose off at the end of his shift. Dead Before Deadline...and Other Tales from the Police Beat chronicles Yocum's years on the police beat for the Dispatch. The tales are sometimes sad, and sometimes funny, and sometimes in odd combination of both. Yocum takes the reader into the life behind the pyline and into the gritty world of crime reporting. It is not a rehash of old headlines, but Yocum explores his interactions with people who made headlines for all the wrong reasons. He tells of a prison interview with a 17-year-old who had murdered both parents; recounts the words of a mother who lost her son to senseless violence; and details a grieving father's plan to kill his former son-in-law. The police beat is not without its humor, and Yocum captures the personalities of the oddball set of characters. Yocum has woven together these vignettes into a compelling book that will fascinate and enthrall readers.

-- and Other Tales from the Police Beat

Dead Before Deadline

A 2017 EDGAR® AWARD FINALIST! Amanda Baron died in a boating accident on the Ohio River in 1953. Or, did she? While it was generally accepted that she had died when a coal barge rammed the pleasure boat she was sharing with her lover, her body was never found. Travis Baron was an infant when his mother disappeared. After the accident and the subsequent publicity, Travis’s father scoured the house of all evidence that Amanda Baron had ever lived, and her name was never to be uttered around him. Now in high school, Travis yearns to know more about his mother. With the help of his best friend, Mitch Malone, Travis begins a search for the truth about the mother he never knew. The two boys find an unlikely ally: an alcoholic former detective who served time for falsifying evidence. Although his reputation is in tatters, the information the detective provides about the death of Amanda Baron is indisputable—and dangerous. Nearly two decades after her death, Travis and Mitch piece together a puzzle lost to the dark waters of the Ohio River. They know how Amanda Baron died, and why. Now what do they do with the information?

Narrator of Favorite Sons Hutch Van Buren is fifteen years old, playing sports and searching for arrowheads in a small industrial town in Ohio with his three closest friends when an altercation between the comrades and Petey Sanchez, a troubled seventeen- year-old, leads to Petey’s accidental death. Together, Hutch and his friends become ensnared in a web of secrets and moral dilemmas. A local ne’er-do-well goes to jail for the crime while the boys keep their pact of silence. Each boy shoulders the burden of truth in his own way as each attempts to leave the past behind. Thirty-three years later, in 2004, Van Buren is the prosecuting attorney in Summit County, Ohio, and a candidate for state attorney general when he learns that he and his boyhood friends weren’t the only ones keeping a secret about Petey’s death. A convicted sex offender in need of a favor attempts to blackmail Van Buren in return for his silence. Van Buren must decide between his political career and the duty of the office he has sworn to uphold. With the clock ticking, Van Buren has a week to seek out his boyhood friends and search his soul while he sorts out three decades of deceit he helped create. Favorite Sons is a wonderful, suspenseful novel with nuanced, memorable characters and unpredictable plot twists.

Robin Yocum

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