Two young men are caught in the crosshairs of shady government operations, mafias, and billionaires. A multi-generational family drama unfolds into an observation of violence in American History: from the Oregon Trail, to the nuclear age, the Vietnam War, and a post-9/11 world.

Joseph Skizzen's family fled from Austria in 1938 to London where his father disappeared, he and his family then relocated to small town Ohio and Joseph grows up to be a decent piano player with a deeply fractured sense of identity.

It's an otherwise ordinary week in April, the week after Easter, 2009. Late in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact, but with no memory of who he is, or how he came to live in Guanajuato. Early in the week, a venture capitalist sits at his desk in an office tower in Los Angeles, attempting to complete his business memoirs, but troubled by the fact that a recent deal appears to be some sort of money-laundering scheme. And in the middle of the week, just before dawn on April 15, two gunmen arrive at an El Paso motel to retrieve a duffel bag stuffed full of currency, and eliminate the man who brought it to El Paso. Thus begins the three-stranded narrative of Novel Explosives, a fiendishly funny search for identity that travels through the worlds of venture finance, the Juarez drug wars, and the latest innovations in thermobaric weaponry, a joyride of a novel with only one catch: the deeper into the book you go, the more dangerous it gets. At the palpitating heart of the novel, at its roiling fundamental core, lies an agonizing reappraisal of the way the U.S behaves in the world, a project that grows more urgent by the day.

Voices after Evelyn seeks not so much to dig up a cold case--the 1953 disappearance of La Crosse, Wisconsin, babysitter Evelyn Hartley-- as reopen its heart. A fugue of voices across time (cracked, offensive, profound) reverberating toward today, when the phantoms of socalled innocence and greatness grow scarier than anything that took Evelyn away. An unsolved crime that jaundiced the way a town saw itself and its relationship to the outside world is rendered into a polyphonic, farcical, yet accurate visitation to the 1950s Midwest, where banality and inspired caprice make for an odd mix of the hilarious and terrifying. "Rick Harsch is America's lost Midwest noir genius, an heir to the more lurid Faulkner, an ex-pat living in Slovenia, a master of dialogue. Voices after Evelyn is a fictional take on true crime, and its bloody heart in the real, still-unsolved 1953 disappearance of teenage Evelyn Hartley in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Through that victimization, Harsch makes us look at other victims, survivors too, and throughout the novel, a Greek-style chorus sings songs of rage and loss and puzzlement. Voices after Evelyn is taut and funny, smart and haunting, enraging and true."--Daniel A. Hoyt, author, Then We Saw the Flames

A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, while experiencing dreams of a battle between good and evil, move toward an actual confrontation as they migrate to Boulder, Colorado.

The absurdity of David Lynch and the zaniness of John Kennedy Toole-- Library Journal (starred review)