Another Day’s Pain

K.C. Constantine returns with the long-awaited final chapter of his saga of the Rocksburg Police Department.

The police force of Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, doesn’t see a ton of action. With jobs and industry moving away from the small city outside Pittsburgh, Detective Ruggiero “Rugs” Carlucci’s greatest adversaries are his negligent vacation-prone fellow officers and an older divorcee who has a habit of dancing naked on her back porch when she stops taking her medication. Retirement is on the horizon for Rugs, and the Vietnam vet is counting the days until he can move on from the job.

But Rocksburg isn’t going to let Rugs drift off to retirement without a fight. Before he can neatly wrap up his career, Rugs will face a mad shooter, a vengeful city councilman, and, most perilously, his own mother.

With a supporting cast of characters painted through uproarious profanity and heart-wrenching confessions, Another Day’s Pain is a bold and darkly funny novel about crime and the damaged souls it leaves behind.

Deeply moving . . . Constantine ends the long-running series on a high note, striking an elegiac tone that never tilts into triteness. Here’s hoping this graceful final act will spark new interest in an unsung master of crime fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW

A brilliantly idiosyncratic police procedural [and] a surprisingly appropriate and moving finale . . . to one of the most impressive oeuvres in modern American fiction.”
—Washington Post

A compelling story that gradually engulfs the reader [and] a fitting tribute to a great and ferocious talent who was unjustly ignored.”
—Ken Bruen, Edgar award-winning author of the Jack Taylor series

Constantine’s final book begins as a cop procedural and ends somewhere else entirely—as a book that locates the pain in its protagonist and then increases the pressure. A surprising and worthy capstone to the Rocksburg canon.”
—John Darnielle, New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats

I’m ashamed to say I never read K.C. Constantine before this. Another Day’s Pain—his last book and my first experience with his work—is dark, funny, razor-sharp, and searching, just the way I like it. It got me hungry to dig back through his entire catalogue. The comparisons to Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, and Ed McBain are apt. I’m sorry I didn’t discover Constantine sooner, but I’m damn glad to find him now.”
—William Boyle, author of Shoot the Moonlight Out, City of Margins, and Gravesend

We all have favorites, and K.C. Constantine was one of my mine. He was a talent and a pleasure and a comfort. His prose was quiet but had momentum, and his characters became richer and richer as the pages turned. Constantine had clear eyes and a heart and a lot of books worth reading.”
—Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone

Constantine writes what are probably the most poignant studies of post-Industrial Age depression in modern crime literature.”
―New York Times

K.C. Constantine is one of the most talked about mystery writers on the American scene. Constantine has a smooth style, and his plots are loaded with unexpected twists and turns.”
―Boston Globe

Constantine writes a terrific mystery.”
―Providence Journal

Constantine shows what a serious crime writer can accomplish.”
―Newsweek