“Appelman writes with soul and swagger. The Cheating Side ignites from the very first page and burns everything in its path. A truly breathtaking read.”

―Alex Gansa, creator of Showtime’s Homeland series.

When Idaho private investigator Jimmy Chinden’s murder investigation threatens a land deal worth millions, the politically protected Aryan mob comes gunning for his family―but the old money outlaws might be outgunned.

From the cheating side of Boise in Garden City, where Idahoans hide their dirtiest secrets, empty-nesting private investigator Jimmy Chinden is tracking a stolen 1961 Impala when he follows a column of smoke into the sagebrush to discover the vehicle―on fire, and with a body in the trunk.

The victim is a reviled swindler, who Jimmy suspects murdered his mother after bilking her out of the no-tell motel she owned. The body’s discovery awakens generational demons and sets off a chain of dark events as Jimmy’s theft case turns into a murder investigation, threatening to upend a land deal worth millions and putting Jimmy’s family at risk as North Idaho white supremacists and their drug cartel associates come gunning for him.

With a cast of characters evoking Elmore Leonard’s society of goons, and a connection to the landscape that is vivid, visceral, and reminiscent of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels, Appelman’s The Cheating Side provides a genre-pushing, socially relevant reinvigoration of the American crime novel protagonist, with a challenge to pervasive masculinity tropes and a biting, no-holds-barred attack on the bigotries of the American West.

Author Spotlight

About J. Reuben Appelman

Connect with J. on his website – J. Reuben Appelman

J. Reuben Appelman’s true-crime crime memoir, The Kill Jar, was published by Gallery/Simon & Schuster (2018) and was among the first of the new true-crime memoir genre. Published in all formats, The Kill Jar inspired the popular Hulu docuseries, “Children of the Snow” (2020), with Appelman serving as on-camera investigator and Executive Producer. The TV Series based on Appelman’s book has streamed tens of millions of times in America and abroad, and The Kill Jar was noted as among the best true-crime books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Elle, Oxygen, Bustle, Crime Reads, and the USA Today network of newspapers.

To write The Kill Jar, freshly chronicling Detroit’s most notorious, and officially unsolved, serial killer case, Appelman meticulously studied thousands of pages of local, state, and FBI case documents, including previously private witness statements, autopsy reports, catalogs of evidence, crime scene photos, interrogation transcription, polygraph results, and personal correspondences and interviews highlighted within piles of bankers boxers obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. He conducted hundreds of interviews and built relationships and correspondences with original task force members. Appelman also worked closely with surviving family members of the victims, one of whom wrote the foreword to The Kill Jar.

Appelman has also written for a variety of successful film projects, including the Netflix-streamed documentaries, Jens Pulver | Driven and Playground: The Child Sex Trade in America, produced by George Clooney, Steven Soderberg, and Abigail Disney and now used as a tool for law enforcement studying the commercialized sex industry. Appelman’s scholarly research and practical experience in the field have earned him a multi-year guest lectureship on the issue of Human Trafficking for the Honor’s College at Boise State University, where he received his MFA. He has published across all genres, is a two-time State of Idaho Literature Fellow, and has been labeled a “full-grown oracle of language” by National Public Radio literary critic, Andrei Codrescu.

Appelman’s other work, While Idaho Slept, tells the horrific story of the University of Idaho murders that gripped the world’s attention from Moscow, Idaho in November of 2022.

Appelman spent five years working as a rigidly vetted fraud investigator, packaging felony-level referrals for prosecution in the states of Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada. A native Detroiter, he currently works as a private investigator from his base in Boise, Idaho, where he has lived for almost 25 years.