“While the book perfectly captures the near fatalistic tone of noir crime fiction at its best, Crane also gives world-weary readers a small measure of hope for the future with his pointed and poignant insights into life and love.”

– Library Journal (starred review)

“Crane’s ambitious, fast-moving debut follows a gay mobster desperate to leave the underworld behind. There’s a lot of bloodshed and a lot of plot twists here. Bold and exciting.”

– Publishers Weekly 

"With razor-sharp writing, a plot that twists and turns without ever veering off course, and an anti-hero protagonist who proves resourceful and sympathetic, Ben Crane claims a spot on the bookshelf next to Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen.”

– Ellen Byron, Agatha and Lefty Award-winning author

"Ben Crane’s debut is a winner right out of the gate. I flew through the pages of this novel, with its palpable sense of place and cast of desperate, lonely characters vying for a priceless lost treasure. At the story’s center is mob enforcer Barrett Rye, The Man of Lies himself, determined to get out after one last score. A novel with echoes of Dennis Lehane and Don Winslow that stakes out new territory the author makes his own, this is a propulsive, irresistibly readable tour de force of crime and redemption. Bravo, Ben Crane!”

– Debbie Babitt, author of First Victim

"A Man of Lies is the kind of book you never want to end, a muscular thrill ride with an exhilarating intellectual workout on the side. I started it unsure whether I could get into a book set in the Chicago underworld, but Crane writes with tremendous cleverness, compassion, and wit, and he has a superb command of language and craft. His narrator, Barrett Rye, is a genuinely unique, a fully dimensional character, and very, very good company. The book delivers twist after twist, surprise after surprise. Crane’s knowledge of the seamy world he takes the reader into is so compelling and intimate that you start to wonder if he learned it or lived it. A terrific read.”

– Ellen Pall, author of Must Read Well

"With a seven-feet-tall antihero protagonist, dialogue as rapid as gunfire, Ben Crane’s A Man of Lies is fast, fun, dark, witty, and immediately visual, a tale of murder and revenge that fires on every possible cylinder.”

– Jonathan Santlofer, bestselling author of The Last Mona Lisa