JACK ROSS

Deborah Jones, rookie reporter on the Miami Herald , is determined to discover the truth about William Craig, an 82-year-old Scot and Second World War hero who is on death row for killing a senator's son who raped his granddaughter. Although Deborah admires the old man, her interest in the case and her resolve to save Craig from execution is personal as much as professional. She understands the revenge he took because she has been the victim of white date rape. Taking on the powers that be, Deborah exposes the blackmail and corruption that lay at the heart of Craig's trial. As she unearths a conspiracy involving the embittered senator, a right-wing governor and a Florida mafia boss, she inevitably becomes a target for those who would kill to protect their secrets. In the desperate final countdown to save Craig, she too may be forced to disregard the law...

The subject of Jack Rosss latest book is amnesia. A man washes up alone on a beach with no memory of who or where he is; a woman finds him and takes him back to her house. He scans her library to find some clue to his past, his location. Could this strange new world be Atlantis? Jack Ross captures the disoriented state of his lead character in the very layout of the novel. Fragments of text and narrative weave together to reveal a mind searching for its past, its identity.

Trouble in Mind is an intense voyage into the life of a young woman, and a serious reflection upon the art of novel-writing. It is at once a twenty-first century novel and not a novel at all, but an eyeball, subject and object, made up of a million cells."Experimental, assured, contemporary and local, Trouble in Mind is a healthy new leaf in the old stick of New Zealand lit." Katherine Liddy, Landfall #214

In the third volume of his REM trilogy, after the urban inferno of Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000) and the purgatorial stasis of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006), Jack Ross explores the closest thing to a paradise his cast of crazies can conceive of, let alone aspire to. Ross is a lapidarian scholar, fluent in half a dozen languages, but he is also a passionate fan of Americas Next Top Model, and his writing has always refused to distinguish between high and low culture. The very look of EMO mocks the conventions of both literature and academic scholarship - texts are artfully layered on its pages, alongside photographs, cartoons, and cryptic diagrams. Rosss prose is full of dirty jokes, as well as learned asides and sad observations. EMO could keep you busy for years on a desert island Scoop review of books.