Just Parker? How about Dennis Lahane and Jeremiah Healy ... They do pretty good Boston?

Jack Bludis, thanks for your comment. Haven't read much Lehane, I'm sorry to say. Tried the one...Mystic River, but couldn't read anything about violence against children. I have read Jeremiah Healy. Is he still writing a detective series?

Jeffrey, hello to a fellow New Hampsherite!

Thanks for the invite, Jeffrey. This site is great, in that it gives me the one thing I have always been after, and that is a contact with other writers and readers. I write and I read, but I go to work and I take the children to football and I go shopping. Writing was my dirty scret. It'd good to meet other people with the same secret.

The Kinsella book is a great one. He isn't very well known over here, although everyone knows the movie, so everytime I went to the States I would come back with a couple of his books. His style of writing was the one I tried to mimic when I first started to write, until it bedded down into a style of my own, and when I self-published a few years ago, before I got a book deal, my hero was called Joe Kinsella.

My Kinsella book was a very limited edition, as I self-published a thousand, most of which now line my loft (and very good for insulation). I sold around 350, mainly to friends and family.
However, it was that book, called Salem, that got me a proper book deal, as an agent saw it, liked it, and got me a deal. The self-published book is now being re-written as my third book, although the plot is being worked into the current series character, so no more Joe Kinsella.
I self-published because I had been taken on by an agent, who didn't get me a deal, and when we parted company I realised that no agent was going to take me on as I had already been turned down by the big publishing houses. It was a form of closure, to get it off my floor as my great failure. Also, I thought that it's portable format might make it easier for agents to read, and therefore more likely to read it. My only regret is that I didn't let anyone proof-read it. Quite a few grammatical errors and typos.
In terms of my books in the States, I haven't sold the US rights yet. My first book, Fallen Idols, is doing pretty well, although I haven't bought a Lear jet yet. However, the US publishers are waiting to see how the second book goes, Lost Souls. You can get Fallen Idols on Amazon in most countries, including Canada, but not yet the US. The weirdest thing so far has been seeing it on Indian websites, and being reviewed in two Indian newspapers.

I'm with HarperCollins, their Avon imprint, so I'm pleased with that. I'm very happy with them. They've got my first book into supermarkets and airports, so I can't complain at all, and the people I'm working with are really nice people, which helps. The rest is just down to fate, I suppose.
What about you? Is your current writing experience, adult detective novels, much different from your previous experiences? Is it harder for American writers, because of the size of your country. You know, you can be big in New Hampshire but unknown in New Mexico?