Review of Home Invasion by Patti Abbott (Snubnose Press, 2013)

1961 and Billie and Kay are living in Philadelphia.  Kay has recently re-married and is obsessed with pleasing her new husband, her young teenage daughter unsure of her place in the relationship and world. A few years later and Billie has tracked down her real father to a born-again church in Detroit, but he’s a disappointment and the trip ends badly.  At seventeen she’s married to Dennis, a con-artist who’s always on the lookout for a quick buck.  By 1977, Billie and Dennis have two kids, Greg and Charlie, who when not fending for themselves are trying to marshal their drunken mother and scheming father as they move about trying to stay one step ahead of the police and their father’s cons.  Billie has maintained the family tradition of boozing and scraping by, the question is whether her sons will follow suit?

Patti Abbott has a well deserved reputation for writing thoughtful short stories about ordinary people who find themselves living on the edge or caught up in criminal activities.  Home Invasion is her first novel and parses out her skill as a short story writer into a longer narrative that follows the trials and tribulations of different generations of a dysfunctional family of grifters over nearly half a century.  Each chapter is set in a different year at a key inflection point in a family history that involves a whole tapestry of selfishness, misfortune, poor decisions and various crimes -- fraud, rape, cons, neglect, robbery, kidnap, murder -- and prison sentences.  These episodes are told through evocative prose and a narrative that perfectly captures the unfolding scenes, the tenuous web of social relations, complex swirl of emotions, and the foreboding that things will never quite work out as desired.  Although cast as a crime novel and published by a press specialising in noir and hardboiled stories, Home Invasion is more of a social commentary about a family struggling on the edge of the underclass, unable or unwilling to find upward mobility into respectability; a dark, unsettling, sympathetic and thoughtful tale that never quite extinguishes hope.  Whilst not the cheeriest of reads, I thought it was wonderful.

Review of Pale Horses by Nate Southard (Snubnose Press, 2013)

Sheriff Hal Kendrick has a secret he’s hiding from his work colleagues – he’s been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s.  Increasingly forgetful, everyday he struggles to get by, relying on bluff and prompts to perform his duties and a GPS to travel around.  Worse still, he can barely remember the name of his wife or his life history.  His wife wants him to retire before his illness is discovered.  Hal, however, is determined to try and leave the county in a better state than when he became sheriff, or at the least solve the murder of a young woman found in a field.  Colleen Lothridge has been beaten to death with a hammer.  Part-time deputy Danny Cole went to school with Colleen and is friends with her husband, Bobby.  He’s convinced he knows the identity of the killer, a former marine suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  Since returning to Indiana, Korey Hunt has been drinking, blacking out, fighting his demons and anybody who rubs him up the wrong way, and attending therapy.  All he wants is to return to a normal life, not face a life in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit.  Hal might be able to finish his career with a conviction, but it could be at the expense of rough justice.

Pale Horses is a country noir of the blackest kind, offset with strong bittersweet undertones.  The story charts the intersections of three principal characters over the course of a murder investigation: an aging sheriff with Alzheimer’s, an unbalanced deputy with a drug habit and a Christina Ricci obsession, and a former marine haunted by his time in Iraq and Afghanistan.  All three characters are very well drawn and developed as the story progresses.  In particular, Hal Kendrick is a wonderfully observed character, with Southard sympathetically charting his slow decline and increasing confusion.  There is a good sense of place and contextualisation concerning small town, rural America, and the plot is compelling, building to a violent but nicely done denouement.  In my view, it is ready made for a movie adaptation in the vein of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (it needs an indie treatment, not a Hollywood one).  Unsettling, uncompromising, dark and bittersweet, Pale Horses is a gripping read.

I've been lucky enough to read an ARC of Pale Horses and it should be published shortly.

Lazy Sunday Service

Snubnose Press, the publisher of Stiffed, is celebrating its second birthday by reducing the ebook cost of all of its titles to 79p (UK) and 99c (US) for a limited time.  There are loads of great books to be snaffled up at a bargain price, including titles by authors such as Patti Abbott (Monkey Justice; Home Invasion), Tom Pitts (Piggyback; my review), R Thomas Brown (Hill Country; my review), Eric Beetner (Dig Two Graves; my review), Dan O'Shea (Old School; my review), Heath Lowrance (City of Heretics; my review), Andrew Nette (Ghost Money; my review), Keith Rawson (The Chaos We Know), Aaron Philip Clark (A Healthy Fear of Man) and loads of others.

 



Stiffed can be purchased for 99c from Amazon US or 79p from Amazon UK

Stiffed published

My new novel, Stiffed, was published yesterday by Snubnose Press.  It's a screwball noir set in New England about a group of friends trying to get rid of a body and, in so doing, plunge themselves into more and more trouble.  The tagline is: 'Friends help you move, true friends help you move bodies', and the backcover blurb is below.  I'd like to give my heartfelt thanks to Brian Lindenmuth and R Thomas Brown at Snubnose for publishing the book, the latter in particular did a great job at guiding the book through editing and production and into reader's hands.  The fantastic cover was designed by Eric Beetner.  If you're looking for a couple of great noir reads then check out Ron and Eric's novels - Hill Country and The Devil Doesn't Want Me. 

You can buy Stiffed as:

an ebook: Amazon US and Amazon UK
a paperback: Amazon US and Amazon UK


Stiffed
 
Tadhg Maguire wakes to find himself spooning a dead man.  The stiff is Tony Marino, lieutenant to mobster Aldo Pirelli.  It doesn't matter how the local enforcer ended up between Tadhg’s sheets, Pirelli is liable to leap to the wrong conclusion and demand rough justice.

The right thing to do would be to call the cops.

The sensible thing to do would be to disappear.  Forever.

The only other option is to get rid of the body and pretend it was never there.  No body, no crime.

What he needs is a couple of friends to help dispose of the heavy corpse.  Little do Tadhg’s friends know what kind of reward they’ll receive for their selfless act – threatened, chased, shot at, and kidnapped with demands to return a million dollars they don’t possess.

By mid-afternoon Tadhg is the most wanted man in America.  Not bad for someone who’d never previously had so much as parking ticket.

If he survives the day he’s resigned to serving time, but not before he saves his friends from the same fate.

Review of Ghost Money by Andrew Nette (Snubnose Press, 2012)

The mid-1990s and Max Quinlan, the son of an Australian soldier and Vietnamese mother, has left the Victorian police force after messing up a case whilst on secondment to Bangkok, Thailand.  Now he finds himself back in the city hunting for Charles Avery.  His sister and a bunch of Melbourne investors are keen to know what the lawyer turned gem dealer has done with their ten million dollar investment in his latest business venture.  All Quinlan finds in Bangkok is the dead body of Avery’s partner and evidence to suggest that he has fled to Cambodia.  Quinlan heads after him to the city of Phnom Penh trying to pick up his trail.  The country is still finding its feet after the rule of the Khmer Rouge and occupation by the Vietnamese, trying to heal the wounds of genocide and a dysfunctional society.  Hooking up with an Australian journalist and his Cambodian assistant, Quinlan starts to find Avery’s trail.  It's clear, however, that Avery has been dealing with some very dangerous characters, others are hunting for him, and finding him is going to be a fraught process.  Undaunted, Quinlan pushes on, determined to catch-up with his quarry.

Andrew Nette spent a number of years in Cambodia as a journalist in the 1990s and it shows.  The real strength of Ghost Money is the sense of place and historical contextualisation.  Nette drops the reader into the landscape, culture and politics of the country, without it dominating the story, and one gets a real sense of what ordinary people have been through during various regimes and the unsettled legacy they now find themselves in.  And he does a good job at detailing how an outsider such as Quinlan negotiates this complex terrain.  The story itself is a relatively standard search for a missing person who doesn’t want to be found and has got themselves into a situation they can’t handle.  The plot unfolds with some twists and turns as Quinlan homes in on his target, despite the various threats and warnings given to him.  There were a couple of things that didn’t seem to quite sit right, however.  The first was Quinlan’s naivety - he was an experienced ex-cop, yet he wanders into really dangerous situations with no real forethought.  The second was motivation - I couldn’t understand why Quinlan was willing to risk his life to find Avery, a man he has no connection to or affinity with other than he was hired to the job, and why he didn’t just walk away.  In general, the characterisation is fine, though Quinlan and the other central actors were somewhat skin deep, their back story substituting for personality and character at times.  Other than those quibbles, the story rattles along as a real page-turner.  Overall, an entertaining and informative story that gives a real sense of Cambodia in the mid-1990s.