Jon Sealy

In the sleepy foothills of Issaqueena, South Carolina, Detective Luke Steele is drawn into a gritty mystery when his childhood friend goes missing from his auto shop, leaving only a blood stain on concrete and a cryptic ledger hinting at a high-stakes gambling ring. Teamed with sharp-witted Deputy Kayla Baker, Steele uncovers a cryptocurrency scam and a staged kidnapping gone wrong. As clues lead the investigators to a dangerous showdown on the wild Chattooga River, Luke must confront his past guilt and outmaneuver a ruthless foe to save his friend. As the first installment in Jon Sealy's Detective Luke Steele series, Chasing Keys blends small-town charm with world-class suspense-perfect for fans of C.J. Box, Ace Atkins, and James Lee Burke.

A dead lawyer, a briefcase full of cash, and half a lifetime of keeping it a secret in the Holy City.Wyatt Brewer has a respectable life as a newspaper reporter in the 21st century in the Holy City-Charleston, S.C. One winter morning, he is assigned to cover the death of a mysterious Estonian who washed up on Folly Beach. When intelligence agents Bert Wilson and Penelope Lowe pick him up for interrogation, Wyatt understands he's stumbled into an underground world of spies, Eastern European gangsters, and corrupt government officials-and his 20-year-old theft has come back to haunt him.Part southern crime novel, part cat-and-mouse espionage thriller, Jon Sealy's fourth novel is a meditation on the many ways the human heart can betray us.

CHARLESTON, SC-Wyatt Brewer has a respectable life as a newspaper reporter in the Holy City. One winter morning, he is assigned to cover the death of a mysterious Estonian who washed up on Folly Beach.When intelligence agents Bert Wilson and Penelope Lowe pick him up for interrogation, Wyatt understands he's stumbled into an underground world of crime and corruption. The agents give him a choice: Help them bring down a mole in their division or fend for himself against Eastern European gangsters and dirty government officials.Part southern crime novel, part cat-and-mouse espionage thriller, Jon Sealy's fourth novel is a meditation on the many ways the human heart can betray us.

Jon Sealy's The Merciful is a scathing morality play that explores a cast of small-town characters surrounding a deadly hit and run in coastal South Carolina. The low-country town of Overlook is a sleepy tourist and retirement community known for its golf courses and laid-back lifestyle. But when 19-year-old Samantha James is killed in a hit and run one night while riding her bicycle home from work, the town sets out to crucify the alleged culprit, Daniel Hayward. The headlines tell a compelling story, but the truth is much less clear. As in the film Rashomon, everyone has a "story" about what happened: the media, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, Daniel, and Samantha's family. As the book examines these myriad perspectives, The Merciful's stunning scope ranges from characters striving for a kind of American success that's just out of reach, to questions of data analytics, brain emulations, and the very survival of humanity. Ultimately, however, the novel is a morality play that asks tough questions about the nature of justice-and mercy. What do you do when one moment, one accident, one decision changes the course of life forever? As the novel circles around the hit and run and the subsequent trial, Jon Sealy offers both a gripping courtroom drama and a probing look at questions of justice and mercy in our era of competing narratives and online outrage.

1984. Miami. Enter the high-stakes world of South Florida's drug culture, where a businessman with CIA ties is about to risk it all.Bobby West is on the edge. As chief financial officer for a Miami holding company and a CIA front, he has overleveraged his business in the go-go 1980s financial culture. He turns to a deal-with-the-devil money laundering operation with a local gangster, Alexander French-a deal which quickly goes south when $3 million goes missing. Now Mr. French, a group of Cuban exiles, and an Israeli smuggler named Adriana Chekhov are all after Bobby West to pay up. With echoes of Iran-Contra and the Orwellian surveillance state, The Edge of America is a stunning thriller about greed, power, and the limits of the American dream.

Late one night at the end of a scorching summer, a phone call rouses Sheriff Furman Chambers out of bed. Two men have been shot dead on Highway 9 in front of the Hillside Inn, a one-time boardinghouse that is now just a front for Larthan Tull’s liquor business. When Sheriff Chambers arrives to investigate, witnesses say a man named Mary Jane Hopewell walked into the tavern, dragged two of Tull’s runners into the street, and laid them out with a shotgun. Sheriff Chambers’s investigation leads him into the Bell village, where Mary Jane’s family lives a quiet, hardscrabble life of working in the cotton mill. While the weary sheriff digs into the mystery and confronts the county’s underground liquor operation, the whiskey baron himself is looking for vengeance. Mary Jane has gotten in the way of his business, and you don’t do that to Larthan Tull and get away with it. Hailed as a “grand new talent” (Bret Lott) and a “significant new voice in Southern fiction” (Ron Rash), Jon Sealy has written a haunting debut novel. With its unforgettable characters and evocative setting, The Whiskey Baron is a gripping drama about family ties and bad choices, about the folly of power and the limitations of the law.