AUTHOR

Bruce Hartman

Literature & Fiction | Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Bruce Hartman lives with his wife in Philadelphia. He has worked as a pianist, bookseller and attorney and has been writing fiction for many years. His latest book, THE PHILOSOPHICAL DETECTIVE RETURNS (2020), is a sequel to THE PHILOSOPHICAL DETECTIVE, published in 2014. Both books concern the extraordinary investigations of a blind poet and fabulist who calls himself Jorge Luis Borges, and who, together with his assistant Nick Martin, wrestles with a baffling series of crimes and the equally baffling conundrums of literature and philosophy, including Zeno's paradoxes and the mysteries of destiny, personal identity and artistic creation. Kirkus Reviews called THE PHILOSOPHICAL DETECTIVE "a suspenseful, pitch-perfect novel.. an intelligent, original detective novel." The sequel stands by itself for those who have not read the earlier book. His first novel, PERFECTLY HEALTHY MAN DROPS DEAD, won the Salvo Press Mystery Novel Award and was published by Salvo Press in 2008. In 2008 it was reissued by Swallow Tail Press in a revised Tenth Anniversary Edition. His second book, THE RULES OF DREAMING, published in 2013, was awarded Kirkus Star for Books of Exceptional Merit. Kirkus Reviews called it "a mind-bending marriage of ambitious literary theory and classic murder mystery" and selected it as one of its "Top 100 Indie Books of 2013." Bruce Hartman's eighth novel, a legal thriller entitled THE DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN, tells the story of a young attorney, Charlotte Ambler, who volunteers to represent a death row inmate who asserts his innocence but doesn’t regard his life as worth saving. Charlotte fights to save him in spite of himself as the clock ticks toward the execution date. In this gripping tale of deception and self-deception, betrayal and violence, lawyer and client find common ground in their quest for justice and human values. Award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen (author of the Jack Taylor series) had this to say about THE DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN: "Brilliant!... It is one of the finest depictions of evil I have ever read and is a superb depiction of manipulation.... It is also a highly entertaining mystery with a heroine as compelling as she is gutsy." You can read more on Bruce Hartman's website/blog: www.brucehartmanbooks.com.