|
"Bullets, Booze and Bastards" |
 |
The Bitch by Les EdgertonISBN: 978-0989932301Ex-con Jake Bishop is several years past his second stint in prison and has completely reformed. He’s married, expecting a child, and preparing to open his own hair salon. But then an old cellmate re-enters his life begging for a favor: to help him with a burglary. Forced by his code of ethics to perform the crime, Jake’s once idyllic life quickly plunges into an abyss. Jake soon realizes that there is only one way out of this purgatory . . . and it may rupture his soul beyond repair. Raves for The Bitch“The Bitch is the kind of raw crime fiction that’s right up my alley, like sandpaper for the brain. Edgerton has got the chops. Mad chops. Gonna make us all ashamed of our puny efforts one day.” “The Bitch is a vicious barnstormer of a novel, a noir rollercoaster that won’t let you unbuckle until that final three-word smackdown. Les Edgerton is Eddie Bunker’s pulpy cousin and Eugene Izzi’s soul brother, and with a spiritual family like that, you can’t go wrong. Pick it up immediately.” “Every crime novelist remembers how his breath was literally taken away when he first started to read the early novels of Elmore Leonard. Les Edgerton has used the time he served in prison well. Years from now many future crime writers will also remember discovering him. His first crime novel, but not his first published book, The Bitch is a realistic crime noir kind of novel that reminds me of Unknown Man 89, La Brava, Stick, and The Killer Inside Me.” “The Bitch is superb. Edgerton’s hard, pitch-perfect prose and relentless plot provide a one-two knockout punch of crime novel perfection…the real bitch of The Bitch is that I tried to buy this priceless work and publish it under a new imprint and I couldn’t afford the damn thing. Now it’s gold in someone else’s pocket.” “Imagine, if you will, Les Edgerton, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler sipping straight whiskey while swapping lies in the back booth of the Linebacker bar as the ‘noir’ legends welcome Edgerton into the brotherhood of broken dreams. With The Bitch, Edgerton earns his way into this special literary brotherhood. No, The Bitch isn’t a wild woman, but prison slang for ‘ha-BITCH-ual criminal.’ This is a taut tale of double-cross, death, diamonds and destruction as Jake Bishop fights to protect all he holds dear—his freedom, his pregnant wife, and his teen-age brother—by holding The Bitch at bay when trapped into one last job. Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe could learn a thing or two from this hairdresser.” “I liked The Bitch so much that I wanted to publish it. But we lost out and New Pulp Press got a hell of a book. The Bitch is a dark crime fiction story that never once pulls a punch or ducks behind some bullshit like ‘happy endings’ or ‘closure.’ The Bitch isn’t afraid to stay dark until the very end.” “Les Edgerton. I just read his newest hard-boiled effort, The Bitch, and I realized I didn’t once breathe through the entire thing. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but it is one of the most fun, dangerous, if not pyromanic literary performances of the past year (word up is that parts of it are taken from Les’s own life. Holy crap, this guy shouldn’t be alive!). Like Les’s previous bestselling nonfiction effort on writing, Hooked, this novel is a sure bet.” “Les Edgerton’s brilliantly hardboiled The Bitch is the tense and hard hitting story of Jake Bishop, a reformed ex-con whose dark past drags him back into a life of crime like an umbilical cord tied tight around his neck.” “The satisfying stink of criminal authenticity wafts up from the pages of The Bitch. It reads like the diary of an ex-con who can write—somebody with literary skills but no damn sense for staying out of trouble. Maybe that was Les Edgerton as a young man before life beat some sense into him. If you’re wondering why Goodreads Listopia for classic noir fiction included The Bitch in its top fifty books of all time, alongside Mickey Spillane and David Goodis, the answer is simple: It deserves to be there.” |
