Midnight promise: A Detective's Story in Ten Cases - Softcover

A literary detective story ingeniously told in ten cases. John Dorn is a classic gumshoe. His woman has left him, he lives in his office, and he drinks too much. His one friend, a lawyer named Demetri, hands Dorn an infinite supply of hopeless cases and lost causes, to which Dorn, ever the champion of the underdog and the oppressed, is drawn to “as a sledgehammer is to a kneecap.” A superlative work of hardboiled literary detective fiction, The Midnight Promise wonderfully evokes the underbelly of contemporary Melbourne, its battlers, its hard men, its victims, and its ill-fated heroes.

Zane Lovitt’s stories have been featured in Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2 and in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. “Leaving the Fountainhead” won the SD Harvey Short Story Award at the 2010 Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime fiction. He lives in Melbourne.