I've written about it before, but it is worth mentioning again - there is a great website for used books called Better Books. The place I use is out of Indiana. The only bad thing about the site I use is that the company does not use a bulk rate for books when shipping many at one time. It's per book. Still, with that, I can still order books from them cheaper than buying used books locally.

More often than not, you can get a used hard back book for a dollar.

Anyway, for great southern Gothic like reading, try William Gay and Pete Dexter. William Gay can describe the surrounding environment like few others and Pete Dexter captures the heartbreak of life so well.

Of course, Larry Brown is good for southern life as well.

Edlorah, if you are liking Lush Life, try reading Price's other novels if you have not so far. Samaritan is really good, as is Freedomland. The fascinating thing about Price is how he takes a seemingly simple or single act and turns it on its head and weaves it into a hugely complex tale of right, wrong and the shades of gray that fall in between.

Also, George Pelecanos' later stuff is just excellent and strongly suggested.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane is also very good.

With these, I bought the Big Book of Pulps a few weeks, which is a compilation of pulp fiction stories and the forward to this book has led me to a whole new slew of "pulp" fiction writers. One is Joe Gores' A Time of Predators, which led to another forward by Otto Penzler who then listed a whole bunch of other classic pulp/crime/hard boiled writers.

One was Elmore Leonard's City Primeval, which has now piqued my interest about Leonard's past writings.

Other than these, I have a huge stack of summer novels to read. Through this website I was able to pick a few writers, order their novels and then read them in order (Connelly, Vachss, Crais and Pearson).