Books
The Art of Losing
"★ Dixon is too good a writer
. . . So well and darkly done."
Kirkus
Michael Jacobs, a talented but obscure New York City filmmaker, has just watch his third film flop at the box office. With few options available, Jacobs is tempted by the prospect of easy cash when Sebby Laslo, his producer, makes a one-time offer. Laslo plans to fix a horse race - but his gambling debts have left him untouchable and he needs someone he can trust to be the public face of the operation. Jacobs, hoping to repay an old favor to his friend, agrees to help.
When the plan fails, Jacobs, heavily in debt, is ensnared by a violent underworld. In the inevitable reckoning, Jacobs and Laslo become hunted men - and only one of them will escape.
Keith Dixon's second novel is a morality tale of stunning resonance and symmetry. The Art of Losing captures the corrosive nature of greed, the terrible power of recklessness, and the consequences the erupt when those forces meet.
Ghostfires
"Brilliant . . . fierce and intimate . . . a brave, chilly look into the human soul"
Daniel Woodrell, The New York Times Book Review
Warren Bascomb, a disgraced 68 year-old surgeon, has enlisted his son, Ben, in a smuggling business aimed at keeping Ben flush with cash and Warren supplied with Dilaudid, the synthetic morphine that caused him long ago to lose his medical license.
When Ben's financial problems become overwhelming, he cooks up an insurance scam that fails in spectacular fashion and lands him in the hospital. Suddenly robbed of his Dilaudid supply, Warren is forced to face down the dark memories at the heart of his addiction. And when Ben declares that he's through with the business, Victor Javier, the mastermind of the operation, is roused to violence to keep all the players in line.
Ghostfires depicts, with stunning prose, a family spellbound by addiction and betrayal. Ultimately redemptive, it is an epic tale about the power the dead exert on the living.