Jack Rios - The Complete Case Files

New York. Los Angeles. A city never runs out of things to hide.

Jack Rios reads a crime scene the way he reads a poker hand - patiently, without flinching, waiting for the tell that gives everything away. A former LAPD detective turned NYPD homicide investigator turned, for a time, a man who worked without a badge at all, Rios has spent a career watching the wealthy, the desperate, and the merely unlucky lie to him in every register a city can produce.

He has an informant who trusts him more than he trusts anyone else. A lawyer he can't quite stay away from and can't quite call anything simple. A bar with his name on a chair and a bartender who pours before he's asked. And in every case, a version of the same truth: nobody kills cleanly, and nobody gets away with it for the reason they think they will.

Edward C. Distel writes fiction shaped by memory, exile, war, and the quiet lives history often forgets. Raised in a multilingual household and deeply influenced by the immigrant experience, his work explores loyalty, identity, survival, and the stories people carry in silence.

Drawn to both novels and short fiction, Distel believes the most powerful stories are often the most intimate. His writing blends literary realism with psychological depth, creating characters marked as much by what they cannot say as by what they do.

He prefers to let his characters speak for themselves.

These are his first published works, though far from his only stories.