NOIR QUARTET: Lipstick & Liars presents four tales of mystery and crime from the grim and gritty netherworld of 'Noir'. You'll amble down big city boulevards where danger lurks around every corner, then discover lurid secrets lurking beneath main street's wholesome veneer. There's love and lust, greed and murder, heroes and villains...but it's hard to tell what's what and who's who when everything may be just another lie coated in lipstick.
Whodunits? Not so much. The Noir Quartet series of short story collections by C.J. Thomas are compact reads, each offering four dark tales of murder, mystery and more, set in the 'then' and the 'now', celebrating classic Noir tropes and then reimagining them in fresh settings.
C.J. Thomas is a designer by profession and writer by vocation, a lifelong mystery, crime fiction and film noir fan with a special fondness for classic mid-twentieth century Hollywood crime films, that era's hard-boiled detective novels and crime pulps as well as the commercial illustrators whose work did so much to visualize those genres in paperback and magazine cover art, interior illustrations, movie posters and more. Look for Chicagoland resident Thomas' Stiletto Gumshoe novels and the Noir Quartet series of compact story collections.