In 1904, the brilliant and driven entrepreneur Henry Flagler, partner to John D. Rockefeller, dreamed of a railway connecting the island of Key West to the Florida mainland, crossing a staggering 153 miles of open ocean--an engineering challenge beyond even that of the Panama Canal. Many considered the project impossible, but build it they did. The railroad stood as a magnificent achievement for more than twenty-two years, heralded as the Eighth Wonder of the World, until its total destruction in 1935's deadly storm of the century.

In Last Train to Paradise, Standiford celebrates this crowning achievement of Gilded Age ambition, bringing to life a sweeping tale of the powerful forces of human ingenuity colliding with the even greater forces of nature's wrath.

Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it might be the end of his career as a novelist.

The book immediately caused a sensation. And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution. It was a harsh and dreary age, in desperate need of spiritual renewal, ready to embrace a book that ended with blessings for one and all.

With warmth, wit, and an infusion of Christmas cheer, Les Standiford whisks us back to Victorian England, its most beloved storyteller, and the birth of the Christmas we know best. The Man Who Invented Christmas is a rich and satisfying read for Scrooges and sentimentalists alike.

Masterful . . . Standiford has a way of making the 1890s resonate with a twenty-first-century audience.--USA Today

The narrative is as absorbing as that of any good novel--and as difficult to put down.--Miami Herald

The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the riveting story of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the bloody steelworkers' strike that transformed their fabled partnership into a furious rivalry. Set against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, Meet You in Hell captures the majesty and danger of steel manufacturing, the rough-and-tumble of the business world, and the fraught relationship between the world's richest man and the ruthless coke magnate to whom he entrusted his companies. The result is an extraordinary work of popular history.

Praise for Meet You in Hell

To the list of the signal relationships of American history . . . we can add one more: Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick . . . The tale is deftly set out by Les Standiford.--Wall Street Journal

Standiford tells the story with the skills of a novelist . . . a colloquial style that is mindful of William Manchester's great The Glory and the Dream.--Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

A muscular, enthralling read that takes you back to a time when two titans of industry clashed in a battle of wills and egos that had seismic ramifications not only for themselves but for anyone living in the United States, then and now.--Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

Battle for the Big Top is the untold story of the battles of the three circus kings--James Bailey, P.T. Barnum, and John Ringling-all vying for control of the vastly profitable and widely influential American Circus.
New York Times bestselling author Les Standiford recreates a remarkable era when a community-without regard for gender, creed, or nationality--would be captivated by the spectacle created by three diversely talented individuals who transcended the ordinary. Ultimately, the rivalry of these three men resulted in the creation of an institution that would surpass all intentions and, for 147 years, hold a nation spellbound.
Filled with details of their ever-evolving showmanship, business strategies, and personal magnetism, this Ragtime-like narrative will delight and enchant circus-lovers everywhere.

An exceptional treat for all dedicated fans of noir fiction. --Midwest Book Review

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume comprises stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

Featuring classic noir fiction from: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Elmore Leonard, Lester Dent, Zora Neale Hurston, Brett Halliday, Damon Runyon, Edna Buchanan, James Carlos Blake, Douglas Fairbairn, Charles Willeford, T.J. MacGregor, Lynne Barrett, Les Standiford, Preston L. Allen, John Dufresne, Vicki Hendricks, Christine Kling, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, and David Beaty.

From the introduction by Les Standiford:

Despite the fact that Miami has in the past decade-plus added a downtown performing arts complex to outdo all but the Kennedy Center in DC, a jaw-dropping art museum by the Biscayne Bay, an exemplary science museum, the establishment of the world-renowned Art Basel festival on Miami Beach, and so much more . . . the operative literary form to portray Miami--the essential aria of the Magic City--is spun from threads of mystery and yearning and darkness . . .

When terrible things threaten in some ominous neighborhoods, in some tough cities, a reader of a story set in those locales might be forgiven for expecting the worst; but when calamity takes place against the backdrop of paradise, as we have here in Miami, the impact is all the greater.

In this incredibly timely book, Les Standiford chronicles William Mulholland's heroic drive to bring water to Los Angeles and thus to create the city we know today. It's a powerful--and beautifully told--story of hubris, ingenuity, and, ultimately, deepest tragedy.--Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake and In the Garden of Beasts

The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the story of the largest public water project ever created--William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct--a story of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man who's vision shaped the future and continues to impact us today.

In 1907, Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and built one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles--allowing this small, resource-challenged desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-then-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century.

With energy and colorful detail, Water to the Angels brings to life the personalities, politics, and power--including bribery, deception, force, and bicoastal financial warfare--behind this dramatic event. At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before--considered by many experts to be the essential resource of the twenty-first century--Water to the Angels brings into focus the vigor of a fabled era, the might of a larger than life individual, and the scale of a priceless construction project, and sheds critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.

Les Standiford's account of the decades-long attempt to solve the murder of Adam Walsh is chilling, heartbreaking, hopeful, and as relentlessly suspenseful as anything I've ever read. A triumph in every way.
--Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

The most significant missing child case since the Lindbergh's....A taut, compelling and often touching book about a long march to justice.
--Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

The abduction that changed America forever, the 1981 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh--son of John Walsh, host of the Fox TV series America's Most Wanted--in Hollywood, Florida, was a crime that went unsolved for a quarter of a century. Bringing Adam Home by author Les Standiford is a harrowing account of the terrible crime and its dramatic consequences, the emotional story of a father and mother's efforts to seek justice and resolve the loss of their child, and a compelling portrait of Miami Beach Homicide Detective Joe Matthews, whose unwavering dedication brought the Adam Walsh case to its resolution.

For such a sun-stoked place. Miami sure is shady. Shadowy, too. Even at highest noon. Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the humidity. And maybe, just maybe, it's our destiny . . . With echoes of Charles Willeford's Hoke Mosely series, the Miami books of Elmore Leonard, the quirk of Carl Hiaasen, who never met a shady character he didn't wanna write, and Edna Buchanan, who seems to know all the shadows, this batch of dirty deep South Florida fiction might just send you packing . . . your own heat. --Sun Post

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: James W. Hall, Barbara Parker, John Dufresne, Paul Levine, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Tom Corcoran, Christine Kling, George Tucker, Kevin Allen, Anthony Dale Gagliano, David Beaty, Vicki Hendricks, John Bond, Preston L. Allen, Lynne Barrett, Jeffrey Wehr.

From the introduction by Les Standiford:

The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city . . . We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the twentieth century. This is where the new arrivals debark these days, and it is no mistake that during the last decade of the last century, commentators as diverse as Joan Didion, David Rieff, and T.D. Allman devoted entire volumes to Miami's role as the harbinger for America's future . . . But for now, the novel of crime and punishment is the perfect vehicle to convey the spirit and the timbre of this brawling place to a wider world.

With the authority and narrative prose style that has gained Standiford's work widespread acclaim, Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu tells the history of this fabled landscape intertwined with the colorful lives of its famous protagonists. Flagler's own marriages to Ida Alice Shourds and Mary Lily Kenan perhaps initiated the dramas to come. While sewing machine heir Paris Singer and architect Addison Mizner created the Mediterranean look of Palm Beach in the 1910s, inspiring the building of such modern day palaces as Eva and Ed Stotesbury's El Mirasol, the centerpiece of Palm Beach became the fever dream of Marjorie Merriweather Post and her equally wealthy husband E. F. Hutton, for whom Ziegfeld Follies designer Joseph Urban built Mar-a-Lago in 1927. Marjorie ruled social Palm Beach through two other marriages and for years on her own until her death in 1973. The fate of her mansion threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the town until Donald Trump acquired it in 1985.

Les Standiford brings alive a fabled place and the characters--the rich, famous and infamous alike--who have been drawn inexorably to it.

With the authority and narrative prose style that has gained Standiford's work widespread acclaim, Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu tells the history of this fabled landscape intertwined with the colorful lives of its famous protagonists. Flagler's own marriages to Ida Alice Shourds and Mary Lily Kenan perhaps initiated the dramas to come. While sewing machine heir Paris Singer and architect Addison Mizner created the Mediterranean look of Palm Beach in the 1910s, inspiring the building of such modern day palaces as Eva and Ed Stotesbury's El Mirasol, the centerpiece of Palm Beach became the fever dream of Marjorie Merriweather Post and her equally wealthy husband E. F. Hutton, for whom Ziegfeld Follies designer Joseph Urban built Mar-a-Lago in 1927. Marjorie ruled social Palm Beach through two other marriages and for years on her own until her death in 1973. The fate of her mansion threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the town until Donald Trump acquired it in 1985.

Les Standiford brings alive a fabled place and the characters--the rich, famous and infamous alike--who have been drawn inexorably to it.

An exceptional treat for all dedicated fans of noir fiction. --Midwest Book Review

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume comprises stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.

Featuring classic noir fiction from: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Elmore Leonard, Lester Dent, Zora Neale Hurston, Brett Halliday, Damon Runyon, Edna Buchanan, James Carlos Blake, Douglas Fairbairn, Charles Willeford, T.J. MacGregor, Lynne Barrett, Les Standiford, Preston L. Allen, John Dufresne, Vicki Hendricks, Christine Kling, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, and David Beaty.

From the introduction by Les Standiford:

Despite the fact that Miami has in the past decade-plus added a downtown performing arts complex to outdo all but the Kennedy Center in DC, a jaw-dropping art museum by the Biscayne Bay, an exemplary science museum, the establishment of the world-renowned Art Basel festival on Miami Beach, and so much more . . . the operative literary form to portray Miami--the essential aria of the Magic City--is spun from threads of mystery and yearning and darkness . . .

When terrible things threaten in some ominous neighborhoods, in some tough cities, a reader of a story set in those locales might be forgiven for expecting the worst; but when calamity takes place against the backdrop of paradise, as we have here in Miami, the impact is all the greater.

The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the story of the largest public water project ever created--William Mulholland's Los Angeles aqueduct--a story of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one determined man who's vision shaped the future and continues to impact us today.

In 1907, Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and built one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles--allowing this small, resource-challenged desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-then-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century.

With energy and colorful detail, Water to the Angels brings to life the personalities, politics, and power--including bribery, deception, force, and bicoastal financial warfare--behind this dramatic event. At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before--considered by many experts to be the essential resource of the twenty-first century--Water to the Angels brings into focus the vigor of a fabled era, the might of a larger than life individual, and the scale of a priceless construction project, and sheds critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.

Water to the Angels includes 8 pages of photographs.

John Deal is such a rich creation, full of anger, courage and doubt, that you may have to remind yourself that you're reading fiction.--Chicago Tribune

John Deal's life is finally coming together--he is reunited with his lovely wife, they have a beautiful baby, and DealCo, his Miami construction business, is booming with post-Hurricane Andrew contracts rolling in. The future looks bright...until the night that his house is engulfed by an arsonist's flames and his wife is terribly burned.

Unbeknownst to him, Deal has stumbled into the path of the sickly sweet plans of sugar cane magnate and Cuban imigri power broker, Vicente Luis Torreno, a man obsessed by his dreams of a repatriated Cuba and the juicy profits of the sugar monopoly he is sure will come with it.

Torreno's sugar-coated influence reaches to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, a fact that more than complicates Deal's efforts to find out who is responsible for this latest tragedy and to avoid joining the string of bodies that litter the South Florida landscape, all the way from the vast cane fields of Lake Okeechobee to the shores of Biscayne Bay.

This suspenseful third John Deal crime thriller from Standiford finds the Miami building contractor tangling with Chinese gangsters who are trying to move in on a scheme hatched by two Hollywood porno magnates to create X-rated films for the huge mainland Chinese market. Deal already has troubles enough?his wife, Janice, has sunk into a deep depression over the serious burns she suffered in last year's Raw Deal, and a close friend has apparently committed suicide, shortly after she has told her film-star sister, Paige Nobleman, that Paige was adopted. Deal and his tenant/pal, ex-cop Vernon Driscoll, begin investigating Paige's birth and, eventually, the friend's death, following leads that take them directly into the porno scheme and the path of some deadly Chinese gang members. Standiford, an unusually fine thriller writer who has won the Frank O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and who directs the creative writing program at Florida International University, is at the top of his game here, displaying excellent pacing and a particular affinity for action scenes. The ongoing saga of John Deal remains especially intriguing above all, however, because its author drenches each volume in the ambiguities?sometimes rewarding, sometimes nightmarish?of real life.

Life looks good for John Deal. A new contract promises to put the family business in the black and restore its reputation, tarnished by suicide, the suicide of John's father. Getting out from under Barton Deal's shady past is tough. The new contract is linked to old ties--like the multi-million dollar pact Barton made with Miami mobster Lucky Rhodes decades ago. Now both men are gone, the money has vanished, and Lucky's son wants it back. John Deal is about to discover just how deep blood ties can cut...

John Deal has spent much of his adult life trying to rebuild the Miami construction firm that his late father ruined. When the possibility of a major project in post-normalized Cuba arises, he cant help but be intrigued. But Deal quickly learns that hes been lured to Havana for another, more dangerous purpose: to help a freedom-fighting group spring an American prisoner from a Castro jail. Of course, Deal wants nothing to do with ituntil he discovers who the prisoner is. That prisoner is also the holder of secrets, highly sensitive information that Deals own government thinks worth killing for. The next chapter in the edge-of-your-seat John Deal series.

Reluctant sleuth and Miami developer John Deal is the last of his kind - a builder who appreciates his craft. His friend Arch Dolan was the last of his kind, too, a Miami bookseller who sold books because he loved them. Now someone has killed him for it. And he's only the first body to fall. In quick succession the CEO of a huge bookstore chain and a local lawyer meet violent ends...and Deal starts finding connections. Still, it's not easy for Deal: his estranged wife Janice, is still emotionally and physically scarred from mishaps the last time Deal stepped into the path of the wrong people. But Janice was close to Arch and she's as eager to find the killer as her husband. Working together, they discover that Arch's sister, lately employed by a charismatic revivalist, has disappeared. With the clues pointing north, Deal and Janice set out on a journey to a distant and frigid climate, one that threatens to chill them out for good.

Done Deal is the first in the series featuring reluctant sleuth John Deal, a South Florida building contractor who has a penchant for stepping into the path of the wrong people. Here, Deal is struggling to rebuild the once formidable DealCo, a development company once headed by his flamboyant father Barton Deal - but little does he know that the piece of land upon which he plans to build a small apartment complex is coveted by a ruthless businessman intent on making a fortune off Major League Baseball's arrival in South Florida.

In the fifth installment of the series, Deal is being awarded the Presidential Medal of Valor, and as a campaign gimmick, the presentation ceremony is held in Miami. During the ceremony, terrorists interrupt with machine gun fire, and Deal and the First Lady are taken captive.