Noir Nation Books, the crime fiction imprint of VegaWire Media, has bought its first title, Slow Burn by Terrence McCauley.

A tale of murder and kidnapping set in the 1930s, the novel introduces vice Detective Charlie Doherty to the annals of crime noir. The release date is sometime in late August to early September.

Here is how the novel begins:

The girl was too young to be that dead, but she was dead all the same. On a hot, humid August night on the floor of a fleabag hotel on Twenty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue called The Chauncey Arms. Room 909.

The girl was naked. Legs together. Arms at her sides. Throat cut. Blood had pooled on the floor around her head in a neat circle, like some kind of halo. Her dead eyes were half-closed, staring out at nothing. The cracked plaster ceiling was probably the last thing the kid saw before bleeding out.