C.J. Box is and Edgar-winning novelist best known for his Joe Pickett series, which started in 2001 with Open Season, and the fourteenth one, Stone Cold, was published earlier this year. He's also started a series of stand alone novels, in which a different character carries over to the next book. We'll be talking about his first collection of short stories, Shots Fired: Stories from Joe Picket Country, and it's available from Putnam.

Earl Swift is a veteran journalist and author of non-fiction books. His latest book Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream, had its genesis as a feature piece he wrote in 2004 about the many owners of a 1957 Chevrolet station wagon. The outlaw motorhead in question is one Tommy Armey, whose tumultuous upbringing contributed to his being the meanest brawler in the Virginia Beach metro area, as well as an entrepreneur whose regard for legal restrictions was minimal at best.

Smith Henderson has won a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award for fiction and a Pushcart Prize. Ecco/Harper Collins recently published his debut novel, Fourth of July Creek, the story of a Montana social worker who faces a crumbling personal life while he's trying to help the young son of a religious survivalist living in the hills above his small town.