Ryan David Jahn

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WHAT PEOPLE THINK

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"Violent, vivid, and disturbing, The Dispatcher is a stomach churner. If you want a book that grabs you -- almost chokes you -- and won't let go, this is it. But it should come with a warning label: Caution, serious writer at work."

Ridley Pearson

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"To call Ryan David Jahn's new novel a fast-paced thriller is a bit like saying David Haye can box a little ... I guarantee that if you pick this up, then everything else in your life will immediately be pushed to the margins."

Dylan Jones, editor of GQ

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"The Dispatcher grabs the reader on page one and never lets go. It's a classic yet bracingly contemporary story of kidnapping, violence, and a father's ferocious courage."

Jonathan Santlofer

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"A well-written, fast-paced book ... along the order of Quentin Tarantino and with a long and bloody trail to the end."

Charlaine Harris

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"Over the past few years a new generation of crime writers has come perilously close to recreating the jaded mindset of the classic noir thrillers, but no one has succeeded quite like Jahn.... [He] leads the new noir pack with a series of palm-sweating situations that pay homage to the classics of the genre while feeling entirely fresh."

Financial Times

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"I stayed up until 2 a.m. to finish ... [a] taut torpedo of a novel."

Baltimore City Paper

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"This isn't how it was supposed to happen, think Jahn's luckless characters ... Wrong. For fans of action-packed suspense, this is exactly how it's supposed to happen."

Kirkus Reviews

LATEST RELEASE

Books

Good Neighbors

Acts of Violence / Good Neighbors

At 4:00 a.m. on March 13, 1964, a young woman returning home from her shift at a local bar is attacked in the courtyard of her Queens apartment building. Her neighbors hear her cries; no one calls for help. Unfolding over the course of two hours, Good Neighbors is the story of the woman's last night. It is also the story of her neighbors, the bystanders who kept to themselves: the anxious Vietnam draftee; the former soldier planning suicide; the woman who thinks she's killed a child and her husband, who will risk everything for her. _________"A terrific debut ... Powerful, compassionate and authentic, it works both as a mystery and as a snapshot of America in the early 1960s." The Guardian (U.K.)"An audacious, inventive piece of literary thriller writing."Daily Mail (U.K.)"Gripping ... a superb series of fictional stories." The Times (London)"Flat-out brilliant ... At once brutal and empathic, fearless and humane, Good Neighbors leaves the reader gasping for what it ultimately reveals: the truth -- about us. A brave, unique, and -- yes -- impossible-to-put-down read. Kitty Genovese died for our sins, and Jahn offers nothing less than final, beautiful redemption."Jerry Stahl

Low Life

When Simon Johnson is attacked in his shabby L.A. apartment, he knows he must defend himself or die. Turning on the lights afterwards, Simon realizes two things: one, his attacker is dead; two, the resemblance of the man to himself is uncanny. Over the coming days, Simon's lonely life will spiral out of control. But Simon has a plan. Gradually, he begins to assume the dead man's identity, fooling his attacker's colleagues, and even his wife. However, when mysterious messages appear on the walls around Simon's apartment, he realizes that losing his old self will be more difficult than he'd imagined. As the contradictions mount, recent events will resolve themselves in the most catastrophic way.Combining gritty noir, psychological drama and dazzling plotting, Low Life is a shocking novel that announces Jahn as a brilliant new American voice.__________"Tightly written and expertly plotted, this second novel from the American author confirms Jahn as a major talent."The Big Issue"A smarter-than-average crime thriller that seeks to challenge the reader at every turn."Books Quarterly"Inventive."Daily Mirror"Armed with a seat-of-the-pants plot that takes some audacious risks and prose that proves gritty and gruelling, Jahn has produced a thriller with a steely death-grip. I walked into a tree reading it; no greater recommendation needed."Financial Times"Fans of noirish tales of paranoia ... will enjoy the Kafkaesque twists and doom-laden tone."Irish Times"A gripping, adrenalin-filled page-turner."Sunday Herald"[An] unputdownable chiller."Telegraph"There is no doubt of Jahn's writing talent ... existentialist and surreal."The Times

The Dispatcher

The phone rings. It's your daughter. She's been dead for four months.So begins East Texas police dispatcher Ian Hunt's fight to get his daughter back. The call is cut off by the man who snatched her from her bedroom seven years ago, and a basic description of the kidnapper is all Ian has to go on. What follows is a bullet-strewn cross-country chase from Texas to California along Interstate 10- a wild ride in a 1965 Mustang that passes through the outlaw territory of No Country for Old Men and is shot through with moments of macabre violence that call to mind the novels of Thomas Harris. __________"Violent, vivid, and disturbing, The Dispatcher is a stomach churner. If you want a book that grabs you-almost chokes you-and won't let go, this is it. But it should come with a warning label: Caution, a serious writer at work."Ridley Pearson"A well-written, fast-paced book ... along the order Quentin Tarantino, with a long and bloody trail to the end."Charlaine Harris"There are books that slyly creep up on you, books that seduce you, books that wheedle their way into you and books that play on your mind so much they deliver stark realisations when you're not even reading them. When you're driving to work, for example, and the nuance of something a character says suddenly alters everything you think about them, causing you to cut up the unsuspecting Nissan Altima on your right. And then there are those books that almost force you to put your feet in the starting blocks, place your fingers on the polyurethane, cock your head and wait for the gun. The Dispatcher is one of those books. To call Ryan David Jahn's new novel a fast-paced thriller is a bit like saying David Haye can box a little ... This is the first book I've read in two years that has caused me to sit up until the early hours to finish it ... I guarantee that if you pick this up, then everything else in your life will immediately be pushed to the margins, and when you've finished you'll resurface as if from a ... dream sequence -- dazed, confused and with a thin layer of cold sweat on the back of your neck."Dylan Jones, editor of GQ"The breathless pace virtually demands a single-setting read ... Over the past few years a new generation of crime writers has come perilously close to recreating the jaded mindset of the classic noir thrillers, but no one has succeeded quite like Jahn. The author leads the new noir pack with a series of palm-sweating situations that pay homage to the classics of the genre while feeling entirely fresh -- in a mean, lean, unclean way." Financial Times

The Last Tomorrow

Coming Soon

The Last Tomorrow

Coming soon.

Good Neighbors
Low Life
The Dispatcher
The Last Tomorrow

Biography

Ryan David Jahn grew up in Arizona, Texas, and California. He left school at sixteen, worked several odd jobs, and spent time in the army before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked in television and film for several years. He published his first novel, the CWA John Creasey Dagger winning Acts of Violence, in 2009, and has since published two others, Low Life and The Dispatcher. Translation rights to his works have been sold in twelve languages. He now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife Mary.
Words

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Page 2 On Jim Thompson(Originally appeared in Electric Sheep, June 2010.)If it included having to live his life, no one thinking clearly would want to be Jim Thompson. The years of obscurity, the alcoholism that resulted in frequent hospitalizations, the money trouble, the strokes, and the anonymous death with his career at its nadir and every one of his books out of print: that's not a life anyone would choose.But if one could simply be Jim Thompson the writer, without having to live his life, that's a different matter. Sitting at his typewriter he was fearless. He would not hold back. Most people can't be completely honest with their shrink; Jim Thompson put his psyche on every page for the world to see. And more: he was entertaining as hell while he did so.I think of Savage Night, in which the protagonist/narrator Charles "Little" Bigger recounts meeting a man who claimed to grow sexual organs, the more interesting portions of the female anatomy, on a farm in Vermont:"I fertilize them with wild goat manure," he said. "The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night when they stand on their heads, howling."I think of the end of that same novel, when the goats return, and how it makes even the end of Cain's Double Indemnity seem positively optimistic by comparison.I think of the mad hell Doc and Carol McCoy find themselves in at the end of The Getaway, when they finally arrive in El Rey, towards which they've been running for the length of the novel. It's a madness not even Peckinpah had the courage to try to capture on film.And I think of Lou Ford's sickness taking over in The Killer Inside Me.The façade is torn away, and all the darkest rooms of the mind are revealed.Whenever I feel myself holding back, whenever I feel myself being careful, I think of Jim Thompson at his most honest.This was a man who never worried what his mother would think.

Page 3 A Crash Course(Originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the Telegraph, July 17, 2010.)I was 10 years old the first time I saw a dead body. It was Saturday and my father, a postman, was out walking the streets of Austin, Texas, stuffing letters into mailboxes, while I sat home alone watching cartoons (my mother and two sisters were living in California).There was a crash outside, followed by a sound like low rolling thunder. I jumped, spilling milk from the bowl of cereal in my lap, and then got to my feet. Outside: silence.I walked to the front door and pulled it open. There was a car blocking both lanes, its front end crunched inwards. The man inside was holding the steering wheel with both hands and staring dazed through the windshield. The car he'd hit lay upside-down on the lawn three houses down, surrounded by shattered glass. There was a woman inside, held in place by her seat belt."Ma'am," someone said, I think the woman whose lawn the car had ended up on. "Ma'am, are you all right?"She was not. Her open eyes remained blank, her parted lips motionless. I stared at her for a long time before an ambulance arrived and a paramedic told me I ought to head back home. I did.I numbly walked to my front door and pushed it open and walked to a chair and sat down. The television was still on, but I neither saw nor heard it.Right outside the house in which I slept a woman was dead in a car. When I'd poured my cereal she was alive, but no more. It was a hard thing for a 10-year-old to wrap his mind around.When I went to bed that night I lay awake trying not to drift into sleep. I was afraid of the nightmares I knew would come. It would be two years before I could go to sleep without bad dreams hanging over me, and the thing that helped me get over them, finally, was another car accident.I had moved to live with my mother and stepdad in California by this time, and as I walked home from the bus stop after school a tow truck rumbled past, hauling behind it my mother's Cadillac. It was totalled, the long front end shortened by half, the windshield cracked. I ran after it, book bag slapping against my back. I chased it up the driveway and, with a stitch in my side, arrived just as a man in a stained white T-shirt emerged from the truck. "What happened?" I said. "Where's my parents?""I dunno. I was told to drop a car off at this address, so I did." He shrugged, then got back into his truck and drove away.I looked into the Cadillac. The passenger's side floor was pooled with blood and there were pieces of my mother's blonde hair pinched between cracks in the windshield glass. She, my stepdad, my little sister, and my baby brother -- my older sister was still at school -- they must have all been in the car.I walked around in circles, not knowing what to do. I had seen death once and my mother's car was in much worse shape than that other woman's car had been. I was certain I was now an orphan.Then the telephone rang. My mother was in a critical condition with 23 broken bones, my stepfather was stable, and my two siblings were, cuts and scrapes aside, unharmed.Later I would learn that my stepdad had been driving. He'd seen an out-of-control van approaching and so had pulled to the shoulder and parked in order to be safe. The van crossed both lanes and crashed head-on into the Cadillac at 68 miles an hour. The driver of the van was unharmed.My mother's condition improved and she arrived home two weeks after everyone else. She was bedridden for another month, and in a wheelchair for six months after that. I helped my little sister with her homework and changed my baby brother's diapers. At night I slept soundly.Somehow, having thought my folks were dead, having faced the fact that anything could happen, that there was no way to avoid the randomness of life, was comforting to me or, at least, made it easier to understand there was no point in being afraid. Sometimes catastrophe came to you, that was all, and there was nothing you could do about it.Somehow, that knowledge ended the nightmares. If there was nothing to be done, there was no point in being afraid.Fate was what it was. You could pull your car to the side of the road, but it would come to meet you, anyway.But I still looked both ways before crossing the street.

7 Violence as Entertainment(Originally appeared, in slightly different form, as a blog post, August 2010.)I write what could broadly be classified as crime fiction, which means, of course, that I'm guilty of using violence to entertain. There are those who think this is an unforgivable sin. I don't believe in sin, but I'm more than happy to discuss it as an ethical question. Is it moral to do what I do?But before we can approach that question, we must first be sure we know what we're talking about. Not all violence is created equal. There are, I believe, at least three types of it in entertainment: hidden, realistic, and celebratory.In the first type, the violence, often a murder, takes place off-screen or off-page; the results are not described in any great detail; there is no heartbreaking grief; a dead body is enough; and it is simply a way to get the plot going.In the second type, the violence is shown; it is depicted realistically, often from the point of view of the victim; it can make readers uncomfortable, which makes the violence being depicted morally questionable almost without regard to context.In the third type, the violence is shown; it is depicted in over-the-top fashion, always from the point of view of the person committing the act (think Kill Bill ); and it is made to seem a moral good no matter how many coffins are filled -- we're only killing bad guys after all.I think there is a place for all three types of violence in entertainment -- I am not about to trash entertainments I enjoy -- but I think the first and third are inherently amoral (but not immoral), and the second is inherently moral.Depicting violence realistically is, after all, the opposite of glorifying it. It's an ugly, sickening thing to see; when depicting violence realistically, what you're doing is shining a light on ugliness rather than covering it by hiding the blood or manufacturing a reason to cheer.I think, when considering the moral implications of what we write, the distinction might be important.But when soldiers are coming home in body bags, when schoolyards have been turned into shooting ranges, how can a writer really justify using depictions of violence to, of all things, entertain? Easily. I owe my characters nothing but honesty, and I owe my readers that and a ride worth taking. I have actually had to brace myself with a glass of whiskey before writing certain scenes. Something had to happen -- in the context of the story it could go no other way -- and I didn't want it to. But I believe what I want to happen is almost irrelevant. If in the world of the story a person would die, he or she needs to die. If a hero pushed to the limit does an ugly thing, an unheroic thing, it should be shown, and the ugliness should not be hidden with half-assed moral justifications written from the author's point of view. A character can have half-assed moral justifications for his or her actions, most people do, but when an author puts him or herself into the story to do the same, then there's a problem; then, perhaps, those who complain about violent entertainment may even have a point. I certainly find the otherwise forgettable movie Frailty morally repugnant in its justification of serial murder -- but it's the justification itself I find morally reprehensible, not the depictions of violence. But since I'm clearly speaking about realistic violence in the paragraphs above, what about hidden violence and celebratory violence, the other two sides of this three-sided die?Context considered, military recruiting commercials are the only fictional users of hidden and celebratory violence I can think of which I consistently find morally questionable; but, again, it's not the violence itself that bothers me but the message: joining the military will be a fun adventure!What bothers me, finally, is the fact that they are telling lies. Usually, though, hidden and celebratory violence are not used to lie. They are are used as pure entertainment, and are not supposed to be reflections of reality; their very cartoonishness demonstrates this. They are intentionally detached from the world in which we live. I think assigning a message to such things misses the point. There is a place, I believe, for pure entertainment that tries to do nothing else, and such works should be judged only by this question: Do they do what they set out to do? However, while I enjoy that stuff, I have no interest in producing it. I like exploring moral gray areas. I like exploring questions of when violence is justified and to what limits it can be taken before it stops being justifiable. I like shining a light on ugliness. Thinking about these things, understanding why violence is committed, empathizing with the victim, seeing violence, even fictional violence, and being made uncomfortable by it, these are, rather than morally questionable, the means by which moral conclusions are drawn. The Bible, one of Western Civilization's moral signposts (whether or not you buy its supernatural claims; I don't), is, after all, also one of its most violent books. Horror writers, says Stephen King, tend to be moralists. This is also true of many crime writers. But in order to be a moralist, one must deal with the immoral, and, if you're an adult, the broad band of gray between what is obviously good and what is obviously bad. It is in that gray area that the most interesting stories live, and the most interesting questions.

Page 1 Criminal Weather(Originally appeared in Monocle, September 2010.)In 1926 Dr. Edwin Grant of the United States Veterans Bureau wrote a piece for the Scientific Monthly called "The Influence of the Weather on Human Conduct." It was the result of an investigation into how crime rates and weather patterns correlated, specifically in New York and Denver. He found that violent crime increased with the temperature, peaking at 80 - 85 degrees Fahrenheit (27 - 30 degrees Celsius). Violence also increased on windy days, not because wind aggravated foul moods, he thought, but because there was excessive carbon dioxide in still air in urban areas, and the more dilute the oxygen in the air, the more lethargic you tend to be.More recent looks at the relationship between weather and criminal activity seem to bear much of this out. According to FBI statistics, violent crime is at its highest during July and August and at its lowest in February.Of course, in large cities summer months don't only carry heat with them. Kids are out of school, and, if my youth is representative, are bored and looking for trouble by July and August. Tourists and visiting family members from Kankakee fill the streets and sidewalks, wandering into neighborhoods they should, perhaps, avoid. And come the weekend, even locals want to get outside, want to leave the claustrophobic oven of the apartment for the breezy heat of the beach. Subways are more crowded, traffic is thick and slow as honey.And with more people wandering the streets there are more opportunities for violent contact: more fender benders that lead to yelling; more yelling that leads to violence. The wrong look at the wrong moment or an accidental jostle in a sweat-humid subway car can easily be enough to provoke a violent reaction.Property crime is also at its highest in July and August. People are on vacation, leaving houses empty for weeks on end. Newspapers stack up on porches. Mailboxes overflow.The summer months, in fact, seem perfectly made for the criminal. Burglaries are easier and carry less risk; tourists wander the streets with mouths agape, fanny packs hanging from their hips like ripe fruit for the picking; the opportunities for grifting are suddenly doubled; and streets and subways are packed with people, providing all the anonymity anybody could want. The larger a crowd, after all, the easier it is to disappear into it.Of course, if it gets hot enough, even criminals feel too lethargic to work. When the thermometer hits 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), criminal activity drops off dramatically. When it's that hot outside, who wants to leave the couch and the cold flow of the air conditioner, hit the streets, and find a car whose windows are worth breaking into?Some days, it's best to wait till the sun sets.

4 Giving It Up(Originally appeared as a guest post on the blog of C.N. Nevets, January 26, 2011.)I came close to quitting once. I'd been writing since I was ten, first in a school notebook, then with a used typewriter my stepfather bought for me at a garage sale once he realized writing for me was what baseball had been for him (he'd played semi-pro ball). First it was short stories, then it was it novels. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two I wrote four or five 60,000-word manuscripts. None of them got anywhere. They shouldn't have. They weren't very good. When I was twenty-two I got an idea that seemed better suited to screenplay format than novel format. I wrote the script in three days, sent it off to a major screenwriting competition, and a few months later learned that my script was a quarter-finalist in said competition. I decided screenwriting was easier, and besides, I wanted to make a living as a writer and most novelists couldn't make rent on what they earned from writing.For the next seven years I focused exclusively on screenplays. I optioned a couple scripts, did a work-for-hire gig, turned down another work-for-hire gig (talking dog film), and came to hate writing. I came to hate the constraints of the screenplay format. I came to hate the movie industry, the fact that scripts weren't viewed as pieces of art in and of themselves. I worked hard on writing them well. Nobody who read them cared. They wanted to know if they could attract a star to play the lead. They wanted to know how many set pieces I'd written into them. But worse was this: something like one in ten screenplays purchased in Hollywood becomes a film. The idea that even if I managed a small career as a screenwriter, and I'd had a few small successes, I might never see a script become a movie depressed me more than I can say. The idea of that was worse than simply not being good enough. If I wrote a story and everyone agreed it was terrible, then I could work to get better. But writing stuff that people responded to, writing stuff that earned me money, while still failing to reach an audience -- well, to my mind, you hadn't told a story if nobody'd heard it, and I'd spent the last several years speaking to an empty room.I decided I was finished with writing. I started looking into getting certified to teach. I could go back to school. It would take a couple years, but I had to do something. Writing obviously hadn't panned out. It was time I faced that reality.Around the same time I decided to quit writing, I lost my day job. I'd been working on a reality TV show, the season ended, and, after working on the show for five years, wasn't called back. I shouldn't have been called back. I was in the middle of a pretty deep depression and had done a terrible job on the most recent season. So there I was, unemployed and not writing. I went down to a couple temp agencies looking for work. I got my name into their systems. I called them regularly. There was next to no work. I went to construction sites and didn't find work there either. I collected unemployment checks. In May -- a month after losing my job -- I decided I'd give writing one more shot. I'd bang out a Western novel and try to sell it to one of those publishers that made their money with the library market. I got fifteen thousand words into it when my hard drive crashed and I lost my work. Well, that seemed like a pretty definite sign. I really was finished now.Except I wasn't. Three months later I started a different novel. A novel I wanted to write. I didn't think much about whether it had a chance of selling. I didn't have to. I was writing this one simply because I wanted to write it. I had quit trying to write for a market. This was just something I was doing because I loved doing it. I was writing it as I had written my earliest stories, out of the sheer pleasure of creating a world on paper. It felt better than anything had felt in years. It felt right. It felt like the first drink of water after a long hike through the desert. This is what I had been missing for years without even realizing it. At some point I had begun to focus on the wrong things. I finished the first draft before the end of September. I finished a draft I was happy with by early December. I decided I liked it well enough to try to find a publisher for it after all. I thought it had more life in it than anything I'd written in a long time.A month later, on January 8, I was offered a contract. The book came out eleven months after that. My second novel came out seven months after that. My third novel is scheduled for release in July next year. And I've just signed a contract for three more books. The best career decision I ever made was to stop trying to have a career and instead to once more, as I had as a teenager, write for myself.

5 Writing The Dispatcher(Originally appeared as a guest post on John Scalzi's blog, Whatever, December 27, 2011.)Ian Hunt is less than an hour from the end of his shift when he gets the call from his dead daughter.In that first line is the idea that propels The Dispatcher from beginning to end.It was May 2009 and I hadn't worked (except for the occasional day-labor gig) for the better part of a year. Cash was tight and my unemployment insurance was about to run out.I'd sold my first novel in January, but there was no money in it.I needed a job.I was filling out applications, but they were coming to nothing, and after months of this I was running out of places to send them.Then I found out the LAPD needed police dispatchers. I thought it would be perfect. I could get a job with the city, benefits and all, and material for my writing as well. There were bound to be stories in some of those emergency calls.I sent in an application. About two weeks later I received a postcard telling me I had to take an aptitude test. The testing would take place at a high school on Washington Boulevard the following Saturday at eight o'clock in the morning, but I was advised to arrive at seven thirty.I got there at seven fifteen instead, and found myself at the wrong end of a line that wrapped around the block.Over five hundred people showed up. There were six positions available.The testing took three hours. It involved remembering combinations of numbers and letters (4G5T HY5), strings of details (six foot tall white male with blond hair in a white t-shirt and blue jeans carrying a green backpack last seen heading west on De Longpre), and listening to multiple voices simultaneously while pulling salient information. I actually enjoyed it, and walked away feeling that I'd done well.I also starting thinking about the day-to-day job of being a police dispatcher. I'd be on the phone with people during what might well be the worst moment of their lives. I imagined myself working the graveyard shift in Los Angeless downtown dispatch office, taking one call after another while throwing down mugs of coffee.Then, for no reason, this scene played out in my mind:I'm sitting at my desk with my headset on. The CAD system is up and running. I take a sip from a steaming cup. A call comes in."Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?"The call is from my wife. Our apartment is being burglarized, there's a man with a gun in our living room going through our things, and I'm not there to help. I'm sitting at a desk fifteen miles away, only able to listen to what's happening.I was terrified by the thought, so I knew there was a story there.In The Dispatcher, the call doesn't come from anybody's wife. It comes from the protagonist's daughter, who, after having gone missing seven years ago, has recently been declared dead in absentia, whose headstone is now planted in the local cemetery.But it was that first idle fantasy that got my imagination going.I spent the next several months trying to set the story in Los Angeles. I must have written four or five different openings, each one fifty to a hundred pages long. None of them worked. LA is a big, sprawling city with two dispatch offices (one downtown, one in the San Fernando Valley) and several dispatchers working in each at any given moment. I didn't believe the phone call, it seemed too coincidental that this girl's father should be the one to pick up, and if I couldn't make myself believe the call, I wouldn't believe what followed from it.I finally realized Los Angeles was simply too big. The story, for that reason and others, needed to begin in a more contained environment. It needed to open on the narrative equivalent of a desert island before expanding to the larger world. I threw away the pages I'd written and again started over, this time in a small Texas town of my own creation (though based, in part, on a place I lived while growing up).And this time I believed it. This time it worked.After that, the story came together quickly, in a matter of weeks. Because once I understood the world of the story, I also understood the people who inhabited that world. Only these folks could live in such a place; only these folks could do what they do.I had the right beginning, finally, and everything else followed logically from there.A month after the first test, I learned that I'd done well enough to move on to the next step in the application process. Out of over five hundred original applicants, there were two hundred and fifty of us left. They tested our typing speed, and I moved forward again, along with a hundred and ninety-nine other people. I was interviewed by a three-person panel that consisted of two city-council members and a senior dispatcher, after which I was one of a hundred and twenty-five people eligible for and on the list to be placed in one of the six positions available.They'd be hiring alphabetically.So I didn't end up with a job as a police dispatcher. I did, however, end up with a book about one -- the better deal if you ask me.

Events

Life is, for the moment, uneventful.

Video

The Dispatcher by Ryan David Jahn (book trailer, US release).

Acts of Violence by Ryan David Jahn

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