Hey, Everybody. Thanks for checking out my website. I’m not much of a blogger yet–but I can improve. This time I’m writing to announce that The Clinch Knot will be officially launched October 5. You are all invited to the release events. They are:

Party at Bleak House Books, 5 to midnight, Saturday, Oct. 4, 923 Williamson St., Madison, WI (608-258-5830). We will have food and drink, entertainment, and of course I will be signing books and very eager to meet and talk with my readers. Thanks!

Reading at Booked for Murder, 2 pm, Sunday, Oct. 5, 2701 University Ave., Madison, WI (608-238-2701). We will have refreshments and I will read from The Clinch Knot and sign books.

I hope to see you at one or both of these events, or, if you can’t make it, I hope you’ll pick up The Clinch Knot online or ask for it at your local library or bookstore.

Tight lines! (works for fishermen and writers both, doesn’t it?)

This weekend John sat down with his publisher, Ben LeRoy of Bleak House Books to talk about his mystery series, his inspiration, how he got started as a writer, and his thoughts about the upcoming novel The Clinch Knot.

Here’s a clip.

John’s new book, The Clinch Knot, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Here it is.

“At the outset of Galligan’s stunning third Montana-set fly-fishing mystery (after 2005’s The Blood Knot), Ned “Dog” Oglivie, a self-described “traveling drunk” and “trout hound” who lives out of his asthmatic 1984 Cruise Master RV, has befriended a jailed bull rider’s daughter, Jesse Ringer, and her black boyfriend, D’Ontario Sneed. Then, off a mountain road outside Livingston, soon after an ugly encounter with skinheads, Dog finds Jesse shot to death on the ground and Sneed unconscious in Jesse’s sealed car, nearly dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. Sneed’s earthy mother, Aretha, supplies Dog with comfort and common sense as he seeks to prove Sneed didn’t murder Jesse. With a plot as entangled as a drunkard’s fishing line, this Big Sky excursion into the wilds of human frailty deftly and surely snags the imagination. The ending offers just a hint, elusive as that legendary brown trout of fishermen’s dreams, of redemption for Galligan’s beguiling antihero.”

I’m giving away 3 review copies of my new Fly Fishing mystery, The Clinch Knot. How do you get one? Send an email here and on June 10th we’ll randomly select the winners.

Here’s a teaser from the back cover:

The Dog is in Livingston, Montana, daydreaming about fishing the ‘Stone and, as usual, subsisting on Swisher Sweets, vodka-Tang, and the hope that pretending to forget will be enough.

He’s forged a few tenuous friendships, and now finds himself watching from the bank as troubled local girl Jesse Ringer leads D’Ontario Sneed into the swift current of young love. It’s sweet, really … but some of the locals object to the relationship on the basis of Sneed’s skin color.

Then the unthinkable: vibrant, wild Jesse is found shot in the head, and Sneed is passed out in her car, gun beside him, window seams taped, and engine running. Sneed is hospitalized for severe carbon monoxide poisoning and can’t string together a sentence to defend himself, so it falls to the Dog.

If only the Dog could run from his life without ending up in the tangle and snarl of the lives of others. A man who wants to lose himself in the current must be careful of his backcast; it’ll always keep him tethered to a life he’s trying to forget.