New Pulp Press
Pub date: November 7, 2012
Gotta love a title like that. It hooks you and lures you in with a promise of a lurid tale.
Frank Sinatra is the Yorkshire terrier pup of St. Louis ex-cop and current P.I. Nick Valentine. Nick is a hard drinking, oxycontin-snorting detective and he loves that dog very much. He drives a police interceptor Crown Vic with a bored out engine and glass pack pipes. When asked if he took the regulation shotgun out, he responds, “Yes” without mentioning that he replaced it with one of his own and a chainsaw in the trunk. We all know chainsaws are best operated at full throttle. Nick is still an effective enough detective that he gets called in by the local chief of police to help on cases that might need an extra heavy hand from outside the law. The chief and Nick’s father go way back and Nick was pretty good during his time on the force. So when he shows up at crime scenes, he isn’t greeted with scorn but handshakes.
A credit union gets robbed of a large amount of cash and of course nothing goes as planned. People quickly start dying. Everybody knows you don’t hire a tweaker on your crew. When the money isn’t where it’s supposed to be, the mayhem begins, along with the alcohol and drug consumption. Nick gets called in by the chief for help and is sucked in even further by some friends from the local strip club where much of the action is centered. Things get messy as more people die. And when Frank Sinatra the pup falls into harm’s way, it’s like when you are playing guitar and stomp on the distortion pedal: shit gets loud.
I fucking loved this book. It went quick, read it in a day. I just could not put it down. Even the cover is pretty cool, I mean come on, look at it: a shotgun, newspapers, Frank Sinatra the pup, and a bottle of spilt pills. All the right ingredients, including a cool title, telling you to read this book. I would have liked a little more detail on some of the characters, but that didn’t take me out of the book at all. I hope to read more about the exploits of Nick valentine in the future, as long as his liver holds up. Reading about how much he drinks was like getting punched expertly in the liver. Never mind the oxy’s and other pills, the man’s drinking shocked me. And I must admit, the book left me feeling dirty in a good way. I gotta get my tattoo artist to read it. She has a fantasy about cocaine and strippers and she owns some sort of little dog. Judging by the twisted shit she has tattooed on me, she will love it.
This book is a loud violent bloody hardcore tale not for the faint of heart, brought to us by the crew of New Pulp Press. Go check them out. They are putting out the type of crime fiction I want to read.
Dave Wahlman