The Toby Press: Books - Recently Released

Alphabetical by Author . Recently Released . Toby Crime . Toby Hebrew Classics
Jewish & Israeli . The Republic of Letters

Blood Alley by Tom Coffey New York in the 1940s was a wide-open town. In the city of Swing Street, Frank Costello, and the Stork Club, everything was for sale, including its people. Into this arena steps Patrick Grimes, a World War II veteran who works the graveyard shift for The New York Examiner, one of the city’s brassiest tabloids. Late one night, Grimes learns that a watchman has found the body of a young woman in a squalid section of tenements and breweries by the East River, and races over to investigate. The victim turns out to be Amanda Price, the eldest daughter of one of Manhattan’s wealthiest men. Grimes can’t help but wonder what would draw such a woman to that part of town... Publication date: May 2008 More Info...
The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna Jamie McCloone’s early years in a grim, cruel orphanage have left him wary of people and anxious of change. Now in his early forties, he has no dreams of changing his lonely life as a bachelor farmer until his kind-hearted neighbours, Patrick and Rose, decide he is in need of a wife. Lydia couldn’t be more different to Jamie. Rector’s daughter and proper schoolteacher, she still lives at home, looking after her aged and demanding mother. She dreams constantly of changing her spinsterly fate, but has no idea how to—until a friend suggests she puts an ad in the Lonely Hearts column of the Mid-Ulster Vindicator... Publication date: March 2008 More Info...
A Paragon of Virtue by Christian von Ditfurth NOne by one, over a period of several years, the wife and children of prominent Hamburg citizen Maximilian Holler are being slain. The police are stumped. Are the murders connected? Why would someone want to destroy the family of a muchrespected businessman and philanthropist? Is there a serial killer on the loose? Is Holler as blameless a victim as he seems? Trying to help an old friend-become-policeman discover who and what is at the root of these crimes, history professor Josef Stachelmann becomes embroiled in a tragic and shocking case that has roots stretching far back into the past, all the way to the Nazi regime that is his own area of expertise... Publication date: March 2008 More Info...
The Messiah by Marek Halter After the success of his bestselling The Book of Abraham, The Wind of the Khazars and The Canaan Trilogy (Sarah, Zipporah and Lilah), Marek Halter returns with a remarkable tale—based in truth—of the little-known crusade by a 16th-century Jew to marshal support for a Jewish state, four centuries before the creation of modern-day Israel. David Reubeni is a Jewish prince from the lost kingdom of Chabor. Arriving in Venice, he begins spreading his own gospel of the return of the Jews to a homeland in Palestine. Reubeni scours the European courts for support, ultimately pleading his cause to Pope Clement VII... Publication date: April 2008 More Info...
Farther Along by Donald Harington He wants to get away from it all. Despite a satisfying career as chief curator of a museum devoted to the vanished American past, he finds he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life and culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff-dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark mountains, with only a dog for company and only an atlatl - a primitive spear thrower - to provide him with his supper. His few amusements are the playing of tunes on a hair-comb-and-tissue and writing what he intends to be an indictment of modern civilization in his journals. He makes the acquaintance of a young moonshiner who keeps him supplied abundantly with corn liquor. But after six years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself... Publication date: May 2008 More Info...
To This Day by S.Y. Agnon, Nobel Prize Winner To This Day, Nobel prizewinner S.Y. Agnon’s last novel (first published in Hebrew in 1952), is also his last to be translated into English. It is a brilliantly accomplished and haunting work. On the surface it is a comically entertaining tale of a young writer—a Galician Jew who has lived in Palestine, returns to Europe on the eve of World War I, and is now stranded in Berlin— who wanders from rented room to rented room in a city with a severe wartime housing shortage. On a deeper level it is a profound commentary on exile, Zionism, divine providence, human egoism, and other typically Agnonian concerns. Publication date: April 2008 More Info...
A Rock and a Hard Place by Darryl Wimberley Barrett Raines is a black detective in Deacon Beach, a sweltering enclave in northwestern Florida. Seven years after Ramona Walker, the town’s eternal Homecoming Queen, helped push Barrett onto the all-white force despite bigoted opposition, Raines has made a place for himself—to all appearances he is accepted. But affections can be fickle, as Barrett discovers when Ramona is brutally raped and murdered, and his despised brother, Delton, becomes chief suspect for the crime. It’s a no-win situation for Barrett... Publication date: May 2008 More Info...
Dead Man's Bay by Darryl Wimberley Barrett Raines is about to learn more about life on the dark side of Florida than he ever could have imagined. His life is falling apart at the seams: His wife has left him, taking their twin sons, and he is confined to desk duty because of failing performance. When Barrett and his partner Cricket are finally assigned to a new case involving a brutally murdered man and possible illegal activities, they gladly accept it even though it looks like it will be a dead end. They could not have been more wrong. The case leads Barrett to Dead Man’s Bay... Publication date: May 2008 More Info...
Strawman's Hammock by Darryl Wimberley Barrett Raines is offered an opportunity to run for Lafayette County sheriff against Lou Sessions. Backing Raines is Linton Loyd, a powerful businessman and Sessions’ enemy. Barrett doesn’t understand why a rich white man would want to back him, an African-American, but it’s an appealing opportunity… until Loyd’s son becomes a suspect in the death of a Hispanic migrant female who was found shackled to the walls of a hut in a swamp called Strawman’s Hammock... Publication date: May 2008 More Info...
Pepperfish Keys by Darryl Wimberley Special agent Barrett "Bear" Raines has some slippery fish to fry in Wimberly's cleverly constructed fourth procedural, which hinges on the gruesome murder of Beth Ann Stanton, daughter of Florida senator Baxter Stanton. Raines, "a black cop in a white town"—that of Deacon Beach, just north of the Pepperfish Keys—is still smarting from his recent failure to tie the senator's wealth to dirty money. Eddy DeLeon, Beth Ann's boyfriend and a local criminal, becomes a key suspect after his tryst with Beth Ann on the day of the murder comes to light. When Sharon Fowler, an ambitious local TV reporter, offers to help Bear nail DeLeon, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent agrees despite his misgivings... Publication date: May 2008 More Info...
Pariah by Tom Zigal In Aspen, ex-hippies drive Volvos, ski bums cut million-dollar deals, and Sheriff Kurt Muller is the law: a single father with a checkered past and the notion that right and wrong still matter. But one evening, against his better judgment, Muller spends the night comforting an old flame, a reclusive heiress named Nicole Bauer who’s convinced her ex-lover, the 60s blues idol Rocky Rhodes, is threatening to kill her. Kurt doesn’t believe her story, for good reason: twenty years earlier, Rocky’s body was found on the grounds of the Bauer mansion, and Nicole was charged with his murder. But the next morning, Nicole is found dead, and Kurt is a prime suspect... Publication date: April 2008 More Info...
The Dawning of the Day by Haim Sabato A humble man and a religious man, who worked as a presser in a laundry, Ezra Siman Tov was also a teller of stories, stories that enthralled and captivated his friends in their old Nachlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem. His brother-in-law, Dr. Tawil, gave him a grudging respect, the Torah scholars listened surreptitiously and the Great Writer—SY Agnon?—took his stories and gave them form. But along with his stories, Ezra also had a shame and a secret, which overshadowed his family. And his secret suffering never left him quite free... Publication date: April 2008 More Info...
Modern Hebrew Fiction by Professor Gershon Shaked Gershon Shaked’s history of modern Hebrew fiction traces the emergence and development of a literature “against all odds”—from its European roots in the 1880s, when it had neither a country nor a spoken language, to the flowering of a literary culture on Israeli soil from the founding of the State through the 1990s. The product of more than twenty years of research, it is unique in its scope, profiling four generations of Hebrew writers... Publication date: May 2008 More Info...
Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems by Ra'hel - A Bilingual Edition, translations by Robert Friend Ra’hel (Bluwstein) was born in Russia in 1890. She arrived in Palestine in 1909 and soon became a passionate kibbutznik. Her tightly woven Hebrew poetry expressed a zeal for the Land and nature, as well as the anguish of unrequited love, childlessness, and illness. Ra’hel’s timeless poems have become true Israeli classics, with many set to music. Flowers of Perhaps is the first English-language collection of this beloved Israeli poet. Publication date: May 2008 More Info...