BIO

KIERAN SHEA’s fiction has appeared in dozens of venues including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Thuglit, Dogmatika, Word Riot, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp, Crimefactory, and Needle: A Magazine of Noir ...as well as in some beefy-looking anthologies most of which will make you question the tether of his shiny, red balloon. To his self-deprecating astonishment he's also been nominated for the Story South’s Million Writers Award twice without sending the judges so much as a thank you note. He co-edited the satiric transgressive fiction collection D*CKED: DARK FICTION INSPIRED BY DICK CHENEY and his debut novel KOKO TAKES A HOLIDAY is out now from Titan Books. Kieran divides his time between 38°58′22.6″N- 76°30′4.17″W and 39.2775° N, 74.5750° W.

3/10/13

BTAP: Morgan Leary in NO COWBOYS

Don't know where this yarn came from. Wanted to do a Hurricane Sandy story and this kind of ended up being it because I need to focus on the bigger WIP.  Lots of trouble down on the Jersey Shore these days. People still displaced and such. Spikes in desperate acts of wretched seaside crime. Anyway...Morgan Leary...ex-minor league hockey player and enforcer for Atlantic City crime honcho, Dante Donofrio....Morgan was in my first BTAP story "Backing the Stakes" a few years back, and it looks like he's moved up in the food chain. Still working for Dante Donofrio, and just barely outside my investigator character--Charlie Byrne's orbit. Someday in the future their worlds will collide. Morgan goes to see his uncle out in Mays Landing and (gee, what do you know) smoldering ugliness ensues. More of a character piece. You remember Mays Landing, don't you? Does Season 1 of HBO's Boardwalk Empire ring a bell? Agent Sebso drowned by Agent Van Alden at a baptism? Black sin in those brackish Pine Barren waters. Thanks, David. Onward.