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Coming December 2011 from W.W. Norton

The true story of an American missionary who risked everything in his crusade against a cruel dictatorship, and of a brave Kenyan lawyer fighting to unravel the mystery of his death

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Click here to buy Snitch Jacket, and for more information

A scabrously comic send-up of noir fiction and a detective tale whose deeper mysteries are the nature of friendship, machismo and identity.

Finalist for Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel.

"Goffard's prose shimmers with intelligence and humor, and he has a keen ear for telling detail. Fans of such cultish neo-noir scribes such as Charlie Huston and Duane Swierczynski will be richly rewarded."        -- Publishers Weekly (starred review).

"a wonder of sentences that sing" -- Sarah Weinman, L.A. Times

"Snitch Jacket is a great read, full of the blood and grit of true character. Sometimes hilarious, and sometimes all too disturbingly real, this book announces the arrival of a great new writer in Christopher Goffard." -- Michael Connelly

"Christopher Goffard sees Southern California with a keen eye, and he writes with an incandescent humor that is remarkable." -- T. Jefferson Parker

"In its dark vision [Snitch Jacket] would probably give Raymond Chandler night sweats . . . you won't close it until the last page." -- Gregory McNamee, St. Petersburg Times

 

"This is a thriller packed full of rich situations and even richer characters, and the fact that it is also very funny does not detract from the life-and-death action. Benny and Gus's adventure weaves through alcohol and speed, ending in a coruscating denouement at the Howling Head freak festival in the Mojave Desert. And that's before the double-cross kicks in ... This is a remarkably assured debut from Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard, who writes like an angel and plots like a demon." -- The Guardian (UK)

"Smart and funny and had me by the second page... A classily written caper with an authentically touching streak of melancholy." -- Daily Telegraph

"Funny and fast-moving...amusing and affecting" -- Independent on Sunday

Christopher Goffard is an author and a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. 

A Los Angeles native with an English degree from Cornell University, he started at The St. Petersburg Times in 1998, where he covered cops, city hall, and courts. His work on the Tampa courts beat gave rise to "The $40 Lawyer," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Since January 2006, he has been a general assignment reporter at the LA  Times, writing about everything from border warriors and prison gangs to the legacy of Watergate.

He was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team that chronicled the Bell scandal in 2010, coverage which also won the newspaper a George Polk Award for local reporting, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, and the American Society of News Editors Distinguished Writing Award for Local Accountability Reporting.  Read Goffard's Bell story here. 

His first book, a literary crime novel called Snitch Jacket, was published by Random House in the United Kingdom and by Rookery Press in the United States. It was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel in 2008, has been translated into Italian, French and Norwegian, and is being developed as a film.

The book was hailed by the UK's Guardian as "a thriller packed full of rich situations and even richer characters, and the fact that it is also very funny does not detract from the life-and-death action... This is a remarkably assured debut from Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard, who writes like an angel and plots like a demon." In the L.A. Times, Sarah Weinman declared Snitch Jacket "a wonder of sentences that sing."

Goffard's second book, a nonfiction work entitled You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya, will be published by W.W. Norton in December 2011.