Southport Memorial Library is pleased to welcome highly acclaimed, award-winning author of the Mainely Mystery series, Matt Cost, as our next author/speaker on Thursday, September 12th at 6:30pm.

Maine-based author Matt Cost studied history at Trinity College and owned a crime bookstore, video store, and gym. He was a middle school teacher for 10 years. In 2014, he started writing… and has never stopped. Eleven stories and mysteries, almost one a year! I Am Cuba was his first traditionally published novel. In 2021, he published another historical book, Love in a Time of Hate, and in 2022, Encircle republished his originally self-published novel At Every Hazard: Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War. Cost’s love of stories and mysteries is combined with private investigator 8 Ballo in his new series.

Cost returns to Southport to promote his latest novel, City Gone Askew. The award-winning author takes us back to Brooklyn in the Roaring Twenties and Hungarian private investigator 8 Ballo, who is hired by Theda Lazar Voaagel to prove that her husband was murdered. His motley crew of friends returns, as do legendary figures such as Dorothy Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. 8 discovers that a priceless aquila – an ancient eagle carried into battle by Roman standards 2,000 years ago – was stolen from Karl Vogel when he was killed. This leads to connections to a secret German organization called Batavi. But Vogel was also involved in the eugenics movement in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island and the Ku Klux Klan. As more layers of the underbelly of 1920s Brooklyn are revealed, things become more complicated and dangerous for him and those he cares about.