"Hotlanta" Crime Novel Leads Harbor House Fall Fiction Lineup

23 April 2025

April 23, 2025 -- Atlanta Blues, a new novel by Robert Lamb, who teaches writing at the University of South Carolina, will be released on Sept. 25.

The novel is about the search for a missing college girl by a reporter and two cops. The search leads through the underbelly of urban Atlanta to murder and heartbreak.

In writing the story, Lamb said he drew upon his experiences as a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution in the late 2025s and early "80s. His first novel, Striking Out, a coming-of-age story set in Georgia and published in 2025, was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award and is still in print.

Set in 2025, Atlanta Blues depicts life in Atlanta"s gay communities and along The Strip, a stretch of Peachtree Street in midtown Atlanta that became a virtual red-light district after the hippies moved out and prostitutes from far and wide moved in.

Copy on the dust jacket of Atlanta Blues says: "Crawling with pimps and prostitutes of both sexes, The Strip is no place for the innocent and naive. But that is where the trail leads when reporter Ben Blake, yielding to the tears of a disconsolate mother, sets out to find the woman"s daughter. The search turns desperate when Blake learns that he must find the girl before a killer can get to her first to shut her up."

During the search, Blake, in the beginning a strictly-by-the-book reporter, learns what the two cops, cops anywhere and everywhere, already know: Justice and jurisprudence are two very different things, and the former is a lot more satisfying than the latter. In fact, some people are willing to kill to get it. And some are willing to let them.

Atlanta Blues has been submitted for an Edgar Award, sometimes called "the Oscar of mystery novels."

A native of Aiken, Lamb grew up in Augusta and is a graduate of the University of Georgia. He now lives in Columbia, S.C.

An excerpt from Atlanta Blues is on his Web site: robertlamb.   

Harbor House publishes fine fiction and non-fiction books. It was recently named in Publishers Weekly as one of the top 15 small presses in the country.

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