Joseph Mark GlaznerMurderLand is Joseph Mark Glazner's eighth mystery novel. He has written seven others under his own name and his pen name, Joseph Louis, including the Shamus and Arthur Ellis nominated Madelaine (Bantam Books, NY, 1987). Glazner's new thriller, MurdeLand, marks his return to some of his favorite themes-revenge, greed, conspiracy theories, love, hate, and desperate characters willing to commit murder. This time, he writes from inside the head of Harry Holiday, his antihero and most irreverent character yet. Harry is an out-of-control, young businessman, gambler, and ladies' man, planning the perfect murder to save the family's business and himself. The family business-MurderLand-is a landmark but failing museum of murder and gangland exhibitions located in the heart of the old amusement and casino district of Niagara Falls, Canada. The idea for a museum housing a world-class collection of shocking, murder-related objects grew out of memories of Glazner's mother, the beautiful, eldest child of immigrants, who supported her parents and siblings as a Seventh Avenue dress designer and sketcher during the Great Depression. In the late 1940s, after Glazner was born and the family had moved to rural Warrenville, New Jersey, his mother reinvented herself as a businesswoman, small-town politician, civic volunteer, and inveterate collector of antiques, vintage clothes, costume jewelry, art glass, and anything broken that she thought might one day be repaired but never was. Following in his mother's footsteps, young Glazner collected old swords and guns to display on the walls in his basement. He also collected contemporary guns to shoot in the fields and woods around his family's home. Unlike Harry Holiday, he had no heart for hunting or killing. He ruled out the military, left home at eighteen for Los Angeles, and became a writer. The struggles of the small business owner in MurderLand are a backhanded homage to Glazner's father, a charismatic, high-school dropout from the mean streets of Brooklyn, who became a manufacturer of gloves during the Great Depression in New York City. Glazner's father moved the shop to Plainfield, New Jersey when gangsters tried to extort money from the business in the early 1940s. As a teenager, young Glazner worked on the line in the New Jersey shop as a presser and cutter in the early 1960s. From that vantage point, he witnessed firsthand his father's valiant but doomed efforts to keep the business alive while battling early onset Parkinson's disease. Glazner's interest in Niagara Falls as a setting for MurderLand can be traced back to his first visit there when he was ten. On a family trip to the falls, Glazner crossed his first international border and was amazed and intrigued by the little bit of Canada he saw on the other side. Years later after moving to Toronto, he began to visit the Niagara region regularly as an escape from the big city and soon realized it was the perfect place to locate his fictional MurderLand. Niagara was a border region dividing America and Canada, each with its own subtly different but overlapping cultures. Its world-renowned natural wonder-the falls-was both exciting and dangerous. As a tourist region, it catered to the rich-and-famous and commoners alike. The old amusement district at the falls reminded Glazner of the amusement parks, country fairs, traveling carnivals, sideshows, and roadside museums of his youth in America. Glazner is a graduate of the University of Southern California (BA, psychology, magna cum laude, 1967) and a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He lives in Toronto, Canada where he continues to write crime novels and memoirs. His most recent memoir, Life After America, recounts his arrival and his first two years in Canada (1967-1969) as a war resister, FBI fugitive, new Canadian immigrant, and John Lennon's early collaborator on John and Yoko's "War Is Over" peace initiative. Read More Read Less