Dead in the Ring - Jay Ridler

Minneapolis, Minnesota. When the Atomic Kid dies during a championship match on local TV, pro wrestling becomes a national sensation. Now, the country wants to know-was it real? Sully Alexander, ex-juvenile delinquent and fabricator of "true" stories for wrestling magazines, is dispatched for his first taste of legit journalism: investigate the death of the Atomic Kid.

His unique qualifications? He survived Red Wing juvenile detention facility with the Atomic Kid back in the day, and his estranged mother is Black Widow Moscow, the once-famous woman's wrestling champion turned graveyard-shift mall detective. They are reunited in the Twin Cities where Sully's grit and the Black Widow's contacts open the vault to the secret domain of wrestlers. Amid a world of lies, fantasies, and illusions, Sully discovers that in the "fake" world of wrestling he may end up dead for real.

"DEAD IN THE RING plunges the reader into the surreal, fantastical, and brutal world of professional wrestling, following a determined-and deeply damaged-hero pursuing the truth in an arena sustained by illusion. Ridler's visceral prose and ability to create larger-than-life characters that still sweat, bleed, and suffer make this mystery compulsively readable from the opening pages to when the last body drops." -Kate Alice Marshall, bestselling author of  WHAT LIES IN THE WOODS

"Set in the relentless world of pro wrestling at its zenith (or nadir, depending on your point of view), Jason Ridler's DEAD IN THE RING is a brutal, intoxicating novel that grabs you in a chokehold and doesn't let go. Hardcore noir at its finest." - NYT-Bestselling author Elizabeth Hand, author of GENERATION LOSS (Cass Neary)

"Nobody does hybrid quite like Jason Ridler. Part mother-and-child reunion, part epistolary, part adventures on the mat, DEAD IN THE RING challenges the tropes of storytelling, an iconoclast's fast-paced, no-hold's barred blend of noir and mystery; a love letter to the lost art of wrestling." -Joe Clifford, award-winning author of SAY MY NAME.