Slow Dance in Autumn

by Philip Lee Williams

Meet Hank Prince, Atlanta’s most engaging private eye. He’s bold. He’s tough. He’s tenderhearted. A former AAA baseball player turned detective, Prince is a literate jock with an abiding appreciation of food, wine, and women. Lately Prince has fallen on hard times. His last love ran off with an encyclopedia salesman. He lost his boat, his house, and most of its contents, and he sloshes when he jogs, all due in part to his fondness for Evan Williams bourbon.

Prince is ready to bail out of the private eye business altogether when he gets drawn into the mystery surrounding an old friend’s disappearance. Reinvigorated by the search, Prince pursues the truth and trips acorss a priceless artifact that seems to point to a reason for his friend’s demise. He also stumbles upon Ginny Calvert, and rediscovers the thrill of a new love.

Hardboiled, appealing, Hank Prince might not be the world’s most perfect detective, but he knows the difference between right and wrong, and that’s the code he lives by. When you’ve finished reading Slow Dance in Autumn, you’ll be ready for Hank Prince’s next case.

Perfect Timing

by Philip Lee Williams

Ford Clayton is a music professor at a small conservatory in Asheville, North Carolina, facing a thinning hairline, a crumbling marriage, and the failure of his dreams of symphonic genius. Worn out from wrestling with the triple burden of marriage, music, and maturity, and in need of some resolution in his life, he is startled to recognize his first love, a formerly gifted pianist, in a television documentary on the homeless. Accompanied by his recently paroled, born-again, hilariously insane cousin, Ford sets out on a mission to rescue Camille Malone from the ranks of the homeless, to confront his past and define his future, and to finally finish something he’s started.

Alternately comic and tragic, Perfect Timing is a off-beat, delayed-coming-of-age tale and a laugh-filled journey to the heart of a man who hasn’t seen his heart in years.

The Song of Daniel

by Philip Lee Williams

In the tradition of his award-winning novel The Heart of a Distant Forest, Philip Lee Williams give us another lyrical and compassionate tale, and his most fascinating protagonist to date.

The Song of Daniel is a story of innocence, of a young man who has pushed away his darkest memories to live a simple life as a groundskeeper in a cemetary. Daniel exults in his world and in a few close friends at the trailer park, where he lives with his beloved dog Toggle. Daniel’s world is changed when he meets Rebecca Gentry, an English professor at a university near the cemetary. Rebecca, recently divorced, self-absorbed and cynical, is struggling to write the life of a poet she cannot fully understand.

Rebecca and Daniel are both transformed when they meet, each bringing gifts of joy and sorrow to their days. But a shattering experience from years’ past comes back into Daniel’s life, threatening both his new love and his happiness. Finally, in a complex clash of innocence and experience, Daniel’s childlike life becomes clear and Rebecca discovers a long hidden part of herself–and the key to the poet who so fascinated and eluded her.

This is a story about homeplace, about love and loss of family, about an innocent man’s journey towards experience. Williams, a masterful storyteller, has once again written a beautiful and deeply moving novel.

All the Western Stars

by Philip Lee Williams

All the Western Stars is a memorable story, filled with universal fears and truths. A story of two men chasing a hurrying sundown.

Jake Baker, a seventy-three-year-old former construction worker who walked the high steel, suddenly finds himself ill and relegated to an old folks’ home by his insensitive niece. There he regains his health and meets Lucas Kraft, the shell of a famous novelist and a former National Book Award winner, who is searching for the remnants of his talents and his life. These two men from vastly different backgrounds share a common bond—they’re both on the run. Running from their pasts, from their mortality, from the fear of dying unfulfilled.

Jake and Lucas break out of the nursing home and head west. Like children, they want to be cowboys; like old men, the want to experience life, raw and thrilling, once more while they can. Lucas wants to find a range war where he can prove his manhood: “I will become part of legend, and they will write songs about me, how I rode in from the East and became one of them so fast, how I helped rid them of the evil robber barons from town.” Jake wants to prove that he’s still emotionally alive, and he finds that proof in the comforting arms of Betty Silver, a good-natured, foul-mouthed woman who is searching for her estranged daughter.

As broad as the western sky and as warm as a Texas summer night, All the Western Stars will hold you as surely as barbed wire and as gently as a hug.