Dont Ever Get Old

DON'T EVER GET OLD was one of mystery-publishing's biggest critical successes last year, earning starred reviews from every major trade publication, garnering nominations for the Edgar, Thriller, and Anthony awards, and winning the Macavity Award for Best First Novel. The producer of four Harry Potter films and the Sherlock Holmes sequel, Lionel Wigram, is writing the script for the movie and producing the film version.

In this new novel, set in Memphis, and four months after the events of DON'T EVER GET OLD, eighty-eight-year-old Buck is reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that he can only move around with the aid of a walker, and his dementia seems to be getting worse.

So when one of Bucks long-time foes, a bank-robber named Elijah, comes to Buck looking for protection from mysterious pursuers, Buck wavers. In the end, his desire to cement his legacy by closing out a series of long-unsolved robberies overwhelms his usual antipathy toward doing favors for people he dislikes. Buck agrees to broker Elijah's surrender to the authorities, if Elijah will promise to confess to his long-ago crimes.

But nothing involving Elijah, or Buck, is ever simple, and Elijah's plans for Buck are more sinister than they first appeared.

Written in Buck's signature voice and featuring a mystery that will knock your socks off, DON'T EVER LOOK BACK takes a decades-old feud between two dangerous—and now elderly—men and brings it to a final, explosive conclusion.

This is the first in a one-of-a-kind, spectacularly well-written mystery series featuring Buck Schatz, an eighty-seven-year-old retired Memphis cop with a know-it-all plugged-in grandson as his sidekick. When Buck learns that an old adversary may have escaped Germany with a fortune in stolen gold, Buck decides to hunt down the fugitive and claim the loot. But lots of people want a piece of the stolen treasure, and Bucks investigation quickly attracts unfriendly attention from a Mississippi loan shark, a seven-foot tall Hasidic Jew and a bloodthirsty maniac hell-bent on rubbing out everybody who knows anything about the stolen gold. This is sure to be a big hit with readers who love Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, early Jonathan Lethem and superlative detective fiction in general.

When Buck Schatz, senior citizen and retired Memphis cop, learns that an old adversary may have escaped Germany with a fortune in stolen gold, Buck decides to hunt down the fugitive and claim the loot. But a lot of people want a piece of the stolen treasure, and Bucks investigation quickly attracts unfriendly attention from a very motley (and murderous) crew in Daniel Friedman's Don't Ever Get Old, nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

DANIEL FRIEDMAN is a graduate of the University of Maryland and NYU School of Law. He lives in New York City. Don't Ever Get Old won a Macavity Award for Best First Novel, and Lionel Wigram, the producer of four Harry Potter films and the Sherlock Holmes sequel, is both producing and writing the script for the movie version.