Carousel Books was a short-lived publisher of which I heard it was imprint of a porn publisher, details are few and far between in my internet detecting. Please fill me in if you know any more. The books a generally the same size of a mass market paperback but feel weird in the hand. The binding is sharper. It's like the first time you hold a Pan paperback or New English Library vs. a Gold Medal or a Pyramid Paperback. I don't know what that has to do with anything but I figured I should note it for the future generations to log in the history of the cosmos.
Anywho, Vince Robinson wrote a few books for Carousel and sometimes he was Mike Newton, sometimes it seems he wasn't. Newton is a prolific author of books just in the Men's Adventure realm he wrote "The Executioner," "MIA Hunter," and "VICAP" to name a few. That leaves out tons of Westerns, true crime and other books. Check out
his website to see everything he wrote. The short lived "Intersect File" series was a Newton/Carousel joint and I got an example of that series coming after burning through "Terror at Boulder Dam." Good pulp fun awaits me, I'm sure.
"Terror at Boulder Dam" starts off going 90 miles an hour and never lets up. I haven't read a a novel that moves this fast in a long while. Brad Kendall a Las Vegas private eye who name checks Dan Tana and Mike Hammer is beyond broke which is a warm safety blanket of a welcome for a P.I. fan when a beautiful show-girl saunters into his office with a missing brother. Brad is on the case and immediately gets into hot water and a warm bed with the showgirl. The trouble is a racist rich nut-job out to pull explosive high-jinks on the Boulder Dam. Along the Brad is an accessory to nasty brutal murder, gets into bar fights, accidentally joins The Sons of Paul Revere; the racist-nutjobs private army and since he's not a racist-ass-hat gets his private's tortured with electricity. This builds into a action-packed finale with Armalite's, .45's, Uzi's, flame-throwers, and a helicopter assault on a yacht. My kind of P.I.
Seriously this book is just plain simple fun, Newton seems to slyly wink at the genre conventions and handles action with aplomb. I goes down like it was written as fast as it reads and there's obviously some loose-logic in there, but it's part of the charm. It's a total B-movie of a book, check your brain at the cover and roll with the punches. The paperback is hard to come-by like a lot of the Carousel books, but Newton has put it up as an E-Book that's cheap and easy to obtain. I did and then stumbled onto the actual book, at a highway truck-stops used book shelves in one of the weird twists of fate.
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