Join us on Thursday, August 7th at 6:30pm at The Johnson County Museum for an evening with bestselling authors Michael Koryta and Eli Cranor. Michael and Eli will discuss their new novels Departure 37 and Mississippi Blue 42.

If you will not be attending the event, please use this link to preorder your copy of Departure 37 and this link to preorder your copy of Mississippi Blue 42 for pick up or shipping after the event. Tickets include your choice of Departure 37, Mississippi Blue 42, or both titles in hardcover and admission to the event.

Popcorn, drinks, and personal pizzas will be available for purchase in the theatre. We anticipate this will be a sold-out show. A ticket is required to attend the event.

*Please note that every ticket purchase equals entry for 1 person, regardless of ticket type.*

We are pleased to provide accessibility accommodations for this event upon request. To arrange accommodations or request additional information about accommodations for this event, please email eventservices@wildgeesebookshop.com

Publisher Guidelines:

An optional signing line will be held after the event. Michael and Eli will personalize your copy of Departure 37 or Mississippi Blue 42 and sign one additional title each.

Additional copies of Michael and Eli's books will be available for purchase at the event.

Event Policies:

Outside food or drink is not permitted at this venue.
Photo/Signing line positions are assigned first come first served upon arrival of person and ticket scanned.
A ticket is required for every person attending this event above the age of 2. This event does not allow at-the-door sales and individuals without a ticket can not be allowed entry.
We love it when people share memories from their night but recording long-form video of the author's talk is not allowed at this event. Long-form video is considered to be any recorded video reaching a combined total of more than 3 minutes in length.
By attending this event you are giving consent to be photographed or recorded by Wild Geese Bookshop.
Can't make it to the event? A notification will be sent out after the event to arrange for shipping or pick up of your book.
Books not picked up after 60 days are forfeited and can not be refunded.

About Departure 37:

Horror meets coming-of-age in this thrilling novel in which forgotten Cold War mysteries make a terrifying reappearance, from a writer Stephen King has called “a master.”

On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.

There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making them—and some of the mothers are dead.

While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home—a place she loathes. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn.

She’s about to get much more than that.

Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.

Moving between the two characters and timelines, Scott Carson deftly weaves Cold War espionage with contemporary terror in a story that explains why #1 New York Times bestseller Joe Hill has declared himself “a fan for life.”

About Mississippi Blue 42:

Former quarterback turned Edgar-winning author Eli Cranor throws a glorious game winner in this series debut starring a rookie FBI agent who finds herself caught in the tangled web of a college football empire—and the bloody greed that fuels it.

“Former college quarterback Eli Cranor scores big with Mississippi Blue 42, a fun, provocative crime novel that takes aim at the heart of the American game.”—Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author of An Honest Man

Special Agent Rae Johnson grew up on football fields alongside her father, a national-championship-winning coach. Which is exactly why, fresh out of Quantico, she’s sent down to Compson, Mississippi, to investigate the illicit money flowing into a bustling football program in the heart of the Delta. But two days into the assignment things take a dire turn when UCM’s star quarterback is flung from the roof of a college bar, lands on a bag of money, and dies.

Hoping to turn a routine fraud case into a career-defining bust, Rae ingratiates herself with the fans, coaches, players, and politicians who make up the university’s complex social hierarchy. With rumors of corruption rustling through the kudzu vines, Rae soon realizes there’s more to the game than what she’d learned as a child. And in order to win, she’ll have to put all her father’s lessons to the ultimate test.

In the vein of Carl Hiaasen and Sue Grafton, Mississippi Blue 42 takes a hard and often hilarious look at the big-money world of college athletics. In Cranor’s capable hands, football isn’t just a game, it’s a front-row seat to the great American show.

About the authors:

Scott Carson is the pseudonym of Michael Koryta, a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages, adapted into major motion pictures, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former private investigator and reporter, his writing has been praised by Stephen King, Michael Connelly, and Dean Koontz, among many others. Raised in Bloomington, Indiana, he now lives in Indiana and Maine.

Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he’s traded in the pigskin for a laptop, writing from Arkansas, where he lives with his wife and kids. His fiction has won The Greensboro Review’s Robert Watson Literary Prize and been a runner-up for The Missouri Review’s Miller Prize. Eli also writes a nationally syndicated sports column, “Athletic Support,” and his craft column, “Shop Talk,” appears monthly over at CrimeReads. His debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest. Eli is currently at work on his next novel.