Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.—A faculty member in Mississippi State University’s Department of English is celebrating the launch of his new mystery novel with a Wednesday [April 4] public reading.

Free to all, Michael Kardos’s presentation of “Bluff” takes place at 7:30 p.m. in Colvard Student Union’s third-floor Fowlkes Auditorium.

Hailed by Literary Hub as one of this year’s most anticipated crime, mystery and thriller titles, “Bluff” will be released April 3 by Mysterious Press. Independent literary publisher Grove Atlantic also praised Kardos’s book for taking the reader “deep inside the fraught and fascinating world of a modern magician who becomes obsessed with magic’s dark twin—the underworld of the card cheat.”

Signed copies of “Bluff” are available for pre-order at The Book Mart and Café in Starkville.

Originally from the Jersey Shore, Kardos is in his 11th year as an associate professor of English and co-director of MSU’s creative writing program. He is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of “The Three-Day Affair,” an Esquire Best Book of 2012, as well as the novel “Before He Finds Her.” His story collection “One Last Good Time” is a winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction. For more biographical information, visit www.michaelkardos.com.

Learn more about MSU’s Department of English at www.english.msstate.edu and follow on Facebook and Twitter @MSStateEnglish.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.