Jackets Required: Occupational Hazards

By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2008 10:10:00 AM

This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com. 

Title: Occupational Hazards
Designer: Rodrigo Corral
Author: Jonathan Segura
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 

No genre of fiction has the ability to utterly immerse the reader in a particular locale quite like mysteries. One could plan entire vacations—including reservations for hotels where the staff knows to look the other way—through the crimes taking place in Elmore Leonard’s Florida swamps, G.M. Ford’s latte-sipping sidewalks of Seattle, or Joe Lansdale’s small-town Texas.

Freshman novelist (and PW editor) Jonathan Segura aims to do the same thing for Omaha in Occupational Hazards, a mystery about a beat reporter from the dustbowl whose investigations into a real estate scam lead to murder. Cover designer Rodrigo Corral has chosen to channel Ed Ruscha, an artist primarily known for his depictions of Los Angeles, but whose sepia-toned and dilapidated photographs of dusty plains and dirty building facades betray Midwestern roots.

The cover is pretty classy; a new novelist couldn’t ask for a better suit to show up to his first day of work in.