QUICK SHOTS: Leonardo's Law by Warren B. Murphy

I came to Warren Murphy's work not through his most popular co-creation, The Destroyer but through his comic mystery novels about the insurance investigator Trace. I stumbled onto the Trace books because I had been reading Gregory MacDonald's Fletch series and the covers of the Trace books ripped off Fletch's design. Big font with the title, bold colors, littler font with a snippet of dialog from the book. So, I guess ripping something off does indeed work from time to time.

All in all, I eventually came to like Devlin "Trace" Tracy more than I.M. "Fletch" Fletcher, Trace's books are more consistently entertaining. So, Murphy was on my radar. The old Thrilling Detective Website told me that Trace is the same as Digger, a character from a different publisher. I liked those as well. The same website told me the Razoni and Jackson who appeared in a Trace book had their own paperback series. I liked those too. then I was off and running reading, The Destroyer and other books like Grandmaster. I was a Murphy fan and somewhere along the way unbeknownst to me, he wrote Leonardo's Law for the short-lived publisher, Carlyle.

When I discovered the book, I promptly bought it and filed it away on a shelf and sorta forgot about it. When winter fully embraces the Midwest, my mood tends to run toward mystery novels, I don't know why it happens, but it seems to every year. Then I start rooting around for forgotten favorites or new-to-me books. I was considering re-reading a Razoni and Jackson when I saw this one shelved next to it and felt like I won some sort of forgotten prize. I cracked it open. 

On the cover you see it's a "locked door mystery." My mystery tastes tend to run toward the hardboiled stuff, but I've read a few Ellery Queens and John Dickson Carr and the like, but it had been years since I've dipped my toe into that particular pool and the idea of Murphy tackling the usually quaint and gentile genre in a paperback original from the 70s was an interesting prospect. From his writing I get the picture that Murphy was a bit of a curmudgeon, his characters like to complain, his plot like to satirize (even if I don't fully agree with who he was poking fun at) and they have a wonderful cynical edge about them, what would a cynical, grumpy locked-room-mystery look like? 

Lenardo's Law is obviously supposed to the first in a series of mystery novels. Murphy was a series guy, especially at the time, and you generally don't write a detective novel to be a stand-alone. Our hero Leonardo is an impossible man, much like Poirot or Holmes. He's a professor, an un-official police detective, super handsome, super smart and tools around in a '37 Cord. He borders on parody as a character and his opposite the regular Joe cop Lt. Anthony Jezail (also the narrator) is a fairly stock paperback cop, if a little Murphy-fied. Their dynamic is fun, and it does echo Murphy at his best, when he has two disparate characters bitching at each other, but it doesn't quite boil over enough to be Razoni and Jackson or Chiun and Remo. Maybe if the series continued. 

The "locked door mystery" is fairly interesting, an asshole author is murdered in, you guessed it, a locked room and there's enough suspects to give you pause. Murphy plays it fair and if you pay attention, you can kind of figure it out (I knew a certain character played a part but didn't know the why) and the ultimate solution is wonderfully ridiculous (like the best locked door mysteries) where the book sorta faulters is spending too much time with some really unlikeable characters. We have to put up with Jezail's boss who's just despicable and it rides the nerves after a while. Murphy's asshole characters are usually entertaining to hang around, but Chief Semple is just too much. It's a slim book; I would have rather hung out with Leonard himself more throughout instead of frustrating jerks. 

I always find these aborted series books interesting. Obviously, Murphy might have found his groove with the characters by book #2 and we could have a totally different type of Warren Murphy series to enjoy. Also, this isn't for sensitive readers, there's a lot (too much) casual racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. etc. I sorta of skip over that shit and just get on with the book and I think Murphy was trying to use it all in the satire, (he had done it better elsewhere) but it's still a drag to have to read all the time. 

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Dead Ringer: A Hank Bradford Mystery by Mike Warden

 

A while back I went down a major paperback rabbit hole and started tracking down books published by Carousel Books, a division of American Art Enterprises a, uh, porn publisher trying to go "legit." To do this they hired some up-and-comers and some seasoned pros to (it seems) write whatever the hell they wanted. How else could you account for Irwin Zacharia's Protector books or his Vendetta books. Not to mention his Landshark series (which is recently FINALLY tracked down and need to read and review) which features no actual sharks. Chet Cunningham did some work for them, with a couple of Team Three books and some westerns. Mike Newtown also wrote Terror at Boulder Dam for them, an awesome slice of private eye action, again with some westerns and an action series called Intersect File as John Cannon among others. 

I ended up buying a wide variety of books published by Carousel. Westerns, Gothics, Horror, Science Fiction, Action, and Mystery books by random authors probably working under pseudonyms. It's a stack of books that I will eventually read because publishers have a certain flavor all their own. Pinnacle is sorta one thing, Paperback Library is another thing. Leisure is yet another looser thing and publishers like Carousel are so looser they're falling apart. It's clear that there was little in the way of editorial supervision, so a lot of the books are, well, technically BAD. Sloppily written, wrapped up in a hurry once the word count is met, and very much rough first drafts. That's stuff I love for some reason. Don't blame me for bad taste, I came by it honestly.

One of their longest series is the Hank Bradford mystery series, he's sometimes referred to as a "supersleuth," which coincidentally I want on my tombstone with no explanation. Mike Warden either had a few books in his sock drawer waiting for an eager publisher or wrote them all in a blindly white heat over a couple of years. I haven't been able to track down anything on Warden, if that's his real name. So, drop a line if you know anything about this paperback writer. There's precious little information about Carousel books out there in general. 

So, I have several of the Hank Bradford books and figured it was time to try on. Hank's an ex-cop turned part-time criminology professor. He sorta left the force under a cloud after his partner went on a bust by himself instead of waiting for Hank. Hank stuck around long enough to bust the guys who killed his buddy and then turned in his badge. Now, he's sorta broke living in an apartment, looking to get laid, avoiding his crazy landlady and taking it easy mostly. He's far from a hardboiled character; he doesn't pull out a .38 from his cookie jar or slug a baddie anywhere in the book. Mostly he hangs out and talks up his liberated upstairs neighbor and tries to sleep with her. 

But wouldn't you know it, suddenly his lady friend is getting obscene phone calls with death threats. 'Ol Hank sees this as a great time to try and get into her pants, not that she isn't interested either. Hank must be studly. Anyways, toward the end of the Hank finds a dead body of a guy who he saw in another neighbor's apartment, then that neighbor turns up dead after Hank calls his police nemesis, Oscar. And wouldn't ya know it; Hank's lady friend is the prime suspect. So, Hank plays detective for about two chapters and then the obvious conclusion happens. 

This is a pretty half-baked book. The first have of this (luckily) slim novel is all about Hank dealing with his landlady who sneaks into everyone's apartment, getting sick, then hanging out with his lady friend while she's afraid of the phone calls. Then it's like Warden remembered that it was a murder mystery book and killed a couple of people, only to breeze on past any sort of "investigation" on Hank's part. We hardly ever even leave the apartment building. It kind of feels like Warden was describing one lazy weekend he had but threw in some thriller elements to spice it up.

But you know what? I sorta liked it. It was like an hour read all-in-all, the pages flew by and Hank's a pretty okay protagonist, in a regular joe sort of way. It makes me wonder if the temperature every goes up in the series or if they are all "hang-out jams" like this one. Good thing I have more of them.

HANK BRADFORD BOOKS: 

(I think this is a complete list, correct me if I'm wrong)

Wasp in the Woodpile (1980)

Kill F-M (1980)

Death Beat (1980)

Bitter Homicide (1980)

Dead Ringer (1980)

Model for Death (1981)

The Topless Corpse (1981)

Twins in Trouble (198?)

The Condominium Killings (198?)

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Ninja Master #2: Mountain of Fear by Wade (Ric Meyers) Barker

I'm fairly sure the 80s were just jam-packed with ninjas. It seems like they were everywhere, hiding the shadows with katanas and nun-chucks at the ready. I was a little kid then, and I was well versed in ninja, from Turtles to G.I. Joes, to little suction cup throwing stars and various B-movies on TBS or TNT. So, it makes sense that someone over at Warner Books would think that it'd be a good idea to make a ninja into a paperback hero.

Warner was always trying to have a big men's adventure titles of their own, but they seemingly always picked authors uninterested in writing men's adventure fiction. So, there line of "Men of Action" books suffered from a lack of, uh, action. Not to mention the gun-porn, the sleaze or the fun of their competitors. Ric Meyers was nearly their only writer to get it. Between his work here with Ninja Master (and later in the slightly more upscale version as The Year of the Ninja Master) and the Dirty Harry books, Meyers proved his pulp credentials.

I first encountered Meyers work in the Dirty Harry books. It was one of my first tastes of Men's Adventure paperbacks and some of the first stuff I read after moving past reading a bunch of various James Bond books. Luckily, this was back in the day when you could buy these kinds of books for a dollar at most and I ended up with a whole stack of more adventures of Harry Callahan. I took a few of them on a trip to my grandmother's house and read them quickly, mostly while my grandmother religiously watched The Lawrence Welk Show. *SHUDDDER* But even at the time I knew something was off. I didn't realize that Dane Hartman, wasn't a singular dude. One of the books would be awesome and then the next would be dull as hell. It was confusing. Tough lessons for a young reader.

Obviously, Ric Meyers wrote the good ones (the only ones you really need to read) but I figured that out later. I haven't bothered with #1 of the Ninja Master series since I heed the wisdom of those who tread the pulp-path before me, and it seems like it's a bit of a bore. I'm sticking to Meyers entries. He's a solid author who's written about everyone from The Incredible Hulk to Remo Williams to many non-fiction works on martial arts cinema. He was the right guy to call for a book about a ninja. 

Mountain of Fear is a helluva good time. Warner books were pretty slim, which is perfect for an action tale like this. The books starts out with a bang and keeps the things moving a fast clip. Brett Wallace, our titular Ninja Master is a stone cold killing machine, taking out the baddies with everything at his disposable. It's also got the classic "whole town is bad" story that works great for action stories. A Nazi-concentration camp doctor basically buys up a whole town, puts bad guys as cops and kidnaps women and children to do nasty Nazi-shit with them. There's a little too much sexual-type violence for my taste, but it was a norm then and what are Nazi's supposed to be likable? No. Fuck nazis. 

So, you get a ninja killing a bunch of Nazi assholes in gory detail. Meyers has a love of cinema, and it shows, he writes very movie-like books, everything is clear and the action moves fast but is still well-described. The book builds to a wonderful siege of the bad guy's compound that's just chock full of blood, ninjaing and guts. All that makes for a good time with a book in your hand.

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Coltray #2: Pay the Devil by David Alexander

I've been tackling a lot of David Alexanders work over at Fathom Press where I've been going through Alexander's Pheonix series, if you ever read or even just heard about that series, you know that it's a wild ride. It's really become a cornerstone of an era of Men's Adventure fiction, often whispered about and now commanding high prices on the secondary market. I've been enjoying the hell out of them. It's storytelling cranked to 11 and 100% pure pulp. 

So, I began to wonder about Alexander's other work. And being that vigilante fiction is one of my jams, his Coltray came calling. I've had the books for a while. Like always I seemed to have collected a large chunk of Alexander's work before I read a word of his. Lucky me, as like I said the prices are going up. The Coltray books are sorta lost in the shuffle of his series work on stuff like Z-Comm, Nomad or C.A.D.S. and probably seem a little pedestrian compared to his other sci-fi-tingled work. But they are just as wild as anything he ever typed out.

Stosh Coltray is the Lethalist. You can guess what he does. I guarantee The Lethalist was the original series title. He's a famous vigilante who has enough notoriety to appear on daytime talk shows. Seems like a nice gig. Anyway, he's on the TV show when he runs up against the evil Lavender who is a cult-leader with an "army of zombies" i.e. drugged up followers. Soon Lavender kidnaps a cult-deprogrammer named Dekker's daughter and Coltray and Dekker join forces to smash up some satanic cult worshipers who are protected by a deadly team of mercenary's led by The Coronel. To help they get the coolest character out of prison to help bust the cult up, a hulking man named Sister John who kicks just as much ass (maybe a little more) as Coltray, but does it with style. I'd have read a whole book about Sister John. 

Surprise signature!

I have the first two volumes of Coltray and chose this one based on the cult angle: it's one of my favorite pulp plots. When properly used it gives you a touch of horror with your action and those two things are like peanut butter and chocolate to me. Alexander wastes no time with getting the plot in gear. Everything is popping quick and Coltray, Dekker and Sister John are busy shooting (in gory detail) wave after wave of the Colonel's men as they rush to save Dekker's daughter. There's a lot of gunplay and fighting, some evil women for Coltray to bang and some gnarly cult ceremonies chock full of human sacrifice and orgies. Alexander is a writer whose natural instinct is to push the envelope and deliver on the shock and action. And he does, the books hit some surprising marks, including one scene that made me say "holy shit" out loud and with enough force to scare the cat sleeping in my lap. 

This is the ultimate 80s action TV show episode in book form, like if HBO made a version of The Equalizer and put a lot of boobs and blood in it. It was formulaic as all get out, but I found comfort in that. Coming on the heels of reading Chet Cunningham's Avenger and Norman Winski's Hitman felt I was reading about a buddy of theirs. It's easy to see them all sitting down in a bar and sharing a beer, talking about guns and ammo all while eyeballing the rest of the crooks in the place and waiting for the fight to break out so they can get down to business. 

This is some great stuff. It's top-tier 80s Men's Adventure that harkens back to the grittier 70s style. Best of both worlds. Unfortunately, this is only a three-book series and #3: Vengeance seems to be pretty hard to track down. Which is even more of a shame since this one sorta ends on a little cliffhanger. I mean I figure Coltray makes it out alive to star in his next book but still. I probably should have read #1 first as Alexander really does dwell on who Coltray is or why he does what he does. But who cares? He's the guy on the paperback cover with the gun so he's the hero and he's out doing hero things. What more do you want?

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: Hitman #1: Chicago Deathwinds by Norman Winski

I've sorta avoided Norman Winski's Hitman series. I think it's a subconscious thing, because I've gone on record with my love for Kirby (Kin Platt) Carr's Hitman series and could I have too Hitman book series in my life? Would I be cheating on one with another? Deep thoughts. Well, I've cheated now and I'm feelin' fine.

Norman Winski was like a lot of the writers I read here. He kicked around a bit, apparently wrote a book called The Sex Urge in 1965. Sounds relatable. Then wrote some for the movies, the awesomely named Six-Pack Annie and a pretty solid Wings Hauser (one of my favorite actors) actioner called Hostage which co-starred the editors of Solider of Fortune magazine. He did the novelization of the radical Sword and the Sorcerer. His other writing is, uh, bonkers. It's made up of pop-psychology and bios, stuff on Carl Jung AND Ray Charles. Past that the dude ghosted the internet. I'm pretty sure he died in 2002. 

But Winski got a three-book series out of Pinnacle so that's pretty good, he had worked in the Pinnacle mines before, writing Able Team #2: Hostage Island. And Pinnacle was always on the lookout for another Mack Bolan or another Remo Williams, maybe even, if they had too, another Richard Camellion. Here we have Dirk Spencer, which I'm just going to assume was named after The A-Team's Dirk Benedict and Robert B. Parkers Spenser. He's a 'Nam-vet/rich guy with Uzi's, a Lamborghini and a thirst of action and ass-kickery, also if you believe the photos on the covers, little berets that he wears too high on his head. 

Dirks got it all, ladies, cars, etc. etc. but he misses "the action." Luckily for him (unlucky for others) a family he's friends is killed and it's a shady deal. Dirk decides to become a good old-fashion vigilante. He buys a bunch of guns and rocket launchers and the like and starts blowing people away. Everything goes good with his initial taste of street vengeance, and he basically sets himself up as Batman and sets his sights on whoever does evil. 

And here's where it gets real good, the bad guys are Neo-Nazi's and there's plenty of Nazi-killing! They are all headed up by a politician, Murdoch (again, A-Team?) who's just going around spreading racism, hate and murdering innocents. And Dirk being a good-guy doesn't care for Murdoch's Nazi-bullshit and just starts wrecking Murdoch's shit. Nazis are my favorite villains; they are the perfect bad guys because fuck them, amiright? 

This is an OVER-THE-TOP book, it's wild. There's Uzi drive-bys with planes, Nazi She-Devils, some nice gore, nasty torture, spunky lady reporters, and action galore. Winski was having a good time with this one. It's funny because it is a sorta 80s update of the 70s Kin Platt Hitman. They both wear black suits and masks and take one wild and vile villains. Both series have a playful energy about them even in the sleazy filth that the peddle of writers having a good time pounding typewriter keys. These aren't quite as wild as say, the TNT books or David Alexander's Phoenix books, but this one was close.  

These are a little difficult to track down, I got lucky and found all three in one old bookstore in the clearance section back before everyone looked up every book are priced everything too high. I think I got all three for around a buck-fifty. That's some solid value to the dollar. On the internet they all look like they all go form between ten and twenty-ish dollars. That's a little steep, bit I've paid more for less entertaining books, so...  

QUICK SHOTS: Renegade Roe #2: The Emerald Chicks Caper by L.V. Roper

Recently I added a new bookshelf; it's just a little squatty cheap one found at Wal-Mart for extra cheap. It was an impulse buy, but bookshelf-space is always limited at my joint, so I buy 'em when I find 'em. So, I found a spot in the bedroom (thanks, to my awesome wife for indulging me) and decided to make it an exclusively horror shelf and get a few books out of my basement to help me with my other gig over at Fathom Press reviewing stuff. 

That's a long-winded wind-up to me finding a book called The Reunion by L.V. Roper. And that's not even the book I'm reviewing here. Maybe I should just get to the point, huh? So that got me thinking about L.V. Roper who was among other things a member of the Kansas House of Representatives and I live in Kansas so it's an interesting little tidbit for me...and probably me only. Anyway, back in the 70s he wrote a couple of handfuls of Men's Adventure/Mystery novels, a couple that bordered on horror and romance novels as Samantha Lester. I think generally his best-viewed novel is Death-As in Matador, a hitman tale with a faux Paul Newman on the cover. I haven't read that one yet, I'm saving it for a rainy day I suppose. 

He clearly had a thing for private eyes. My personal favorite of his works is Hookers Don't Go to Heaven, a Kansas City set mystery book that though written in the 70s it really feels like 50's Gold Medal-type private eye yarn. Then there's Renegade Roe which pretty much oozes 70s. This is the kind of book that it would fee wrong to read without an ad for Kent cigarettes in the middle. It might as well come with a patch of shag carpet to set it upon once you're done is what I'm saying. 

I have read this one before and I hadn't really planned on reading it again. Though I did remember it sort of fondly, I think I liked the style and the feeling of the book rather than the ACTUAL book. When I found Roper's Reunion it made me wonder where the Renegade Roe books were and I found them on a shelf of honor, a big monster where I keep a lot of my favorite stuff on and me made me wonder if I actually liked the book or lumped it by Martin Meyers Hardy series because the covers are similar. 

I couldn't help myself I cracked it open and thought I'd just flip around and see what the whole jam was about and two hours of couch laying and a beer or two and I had reread the thing. After that I looked up Renegade Roe on the Men's Adventure Papers of the 20th Century Facebook group and low and behold I had given it a mini review of the book back in 2019. Here it is: 

"This is the 2nd "Renegade" Roe book starring swinging Native American private eye Jerry Roe. It's an easy going read, a little light on the action but it makes up for it with sex, day drinking, and talk about headbands. Even though mystery is fairly lightweight and the characters a just a smidge above cardboard cutouts it all works for me and it's a lot of funky 70s fun. L.V. Roper only wrote a handful of books, and I seem to have magically picked most of the up without trying too hard, anybody know anything about him?"

I liked it more than that this time. In fact, I really had a great time. I enjoyed all the day-drinking and talk about headbands EVEN more. It's very much a product of its time and if you go in expecting an action-packed tale with jets, fisticuffs and gunfights, you'll be disappointed. It's more akin to a 70s TV detective show. Only with more saucy bits. Roe is a fun character who's a cliche in every way and it's a fairly racist character at that. He's a step-above Tonto because at least he kicks ass, solves the mystery and sexes all the sexy ladies. The Lone Ranger would blush. 

But all these books are sexist and racist, I like to warn people (I think the cover is warning enough on this on though) if your sensitive to this kind of thing, this isn't the book for you. Not everything is for everyone and that's okay. But these are almost too goofy in concept and execution to take seriously. Though Roper's does have an easy writing style, clean and simple and he tells a pretty coherent story with some flourish, that's pretty much all I need with a slim paperback.

So yeah, I accidently this book and I'm glad I did. I really don't reread very much (there's too many unread books in my house for that) but it can be nice to visit an old friend. Pittsburg State University in Kansas houses Roper's papers, comprising of the normal stuff, correspondence and such as well as his manuscripts. They don't seem to have all his manuscripts, but one is entitled Jade Jaguar which makes thinks it might be a third book in the Renegade Roe series. It's got the same title gimmick (color/animal), and I can't find any other book Roper wrote with that title. I can imagine he already had this one written before popular library pulled the plug. So, there may be more adventures of Renegade Roe out there, just sitting a special collection room. Maybe one day I'll take a road trip and put on my Sherlock Holmes hat to investigate.  

And my now traditional sign-off, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available on Amazon as an eBook!

QUICK SHOTS: No-Frills Books Mystery by Anonymous (Clark Dimond)

One of the allures of the paperback is the attractive cover. The woman of Robert McGuinness, the action of Gil Cohen etc. etc. There are people who collect the book FOR the cover, not what's on the inside. Some people collect people like that too. It's silly to me, I'm a reader, not an art collector. That being said if there's an edition with a sweet cover, I might lay down a few more bucks for the more attractive copy. I'm not made of stone. But what if there's basically no cover?

No-Frills Books was an endeavor by Jove publishing in 1981 created by a guy named Terry Bisson (the science fiction author) who walked through the supermarket one day and decided books could be wrapped in generic packaging just like the off-brand mac 'n' cheese on the lowest shelf. Talk about out-of-the-box thinking. But the idea was more than just not having to pay cover artist, the idea was to distill a genre into it cover elements and cliches. To have the tongue in the cheek and have hungry young writers crank out 18,000-word tales that briskly broke a whole genre down to its basics. It was mac 'n' cheese, but the cheese would be powderier and the noodles tougher. The ingredients were there but you might have to be in on the joke to eat it or be broke enough. 

So, we got Western, Science Fiction, Romance and the topic of the day here, Mystery. As you can see the books looks like a beer in Repo Man and simply tells us: "Mystery - complete with everything: 'Detective, Telephone, Mysterious Woman, Corpses, Streets, Rain.'" And isn't that all you want in a private eye novel? Apparently before it got sacked there was also going to be a No-Frill Bestseller and a No-Frills Movie, tackling bloated airport books and the No-Frills Movie seemed to be a screenplay. Both sound interesting.  

Clark Dimond was behind Mystery. He worked in and around publishing it seems, working on Warren Publications like Eerie and Creepy and apparently in the art department of True Detective magazine. He was also involved with Web of Horror, a competitor of Warren. He didn't seem to write much which is a shame, music seemed to be his main interest (which must have helped in writing Mystery) and had his own recording studio.

Mystery is a private eye novel. A pure-pulp private eye novel. Something that would have been at home in Dime Detective or Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. But it also has a little bit of 80s punk rock too it. An un-named detective gets involved with a sinister recording, one that hypnotically puts people in trances. The Dick rushes around, finding attractive singers, masked killers, shady record players, hypnotists, evil doers while eating beans for breakfast, and gin and tonics in the evening. He's got a .38 in a shoulder holster and some snark. The titular mystery is a little easy, but there's enough twists and turns to keep it all flowing.  Everything the cover promises it delivers, which is actually better than some painted covers! This feels like a hip-Roger Corman produced 80s detective movie complete with corresponding soundtrack on vinyl and cassette. It's Kiss Me Deadly for the MTV generation. 

It's obviously a brisk read, that was part of the idea. Recently I covered the 90s Dime Novel Predator which tread similar ground. Both concepts were designed to attract the customer with a gimmick. No-Frills had their mostly blank covers while Dime Novels were tiny, like, you know, a dime. Now eBooks shave similar stuff, books designed to be quick reads without a lot of challenge...sort of like cracking open a Black Mask in 1935. But no one has really seemed to fully crack the egg and make it popular. I wouldn't know how to either if I'm honest. Some sort of chip implanted into your brain? I.V. novels? Book-Tok or whatever that is?

Bottom line is that Mystery was a super fun read. There's very little in the way of time commitment. I read it one morning over a couple of cups of coffee and it was a nice way to start the day, a little extra pulp for your diet to get you going. 

And like always, my first novel Gunpowder Breath is available now on Amazon as an eBook!