D. P. LYLE'S PAGE: The Jake Longly series

SUNSHINE STATE (Jake Longly #3)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Serial killer’s message to PI Jake Longly: Two of those seven murders I confessed to are not mine—but I won’t tell you which two.

Jake Longly and Nicole Jamison are confronted with the most bizarre case yet. Serial killer Billy Wayne Baker now denies that two of his seven murders were actually his work. An anonymous benefactor, who believes Billy Wayne’s denials, has hired Longly Investigations to prove Billy Wayne right. Billy Wayne had confessed to all seven. Not only did the confessed serial killer have the motive, means, and opportunity for murder, but his DNA was found at each crime scene. Bizarre doesn’t quite cover it.

Jake and Nicole travel to the small Gulf Coast town of Pine Key, Florida, where three of the murders occurred. The local police, FBI, state prosecutor, and crime lab each did their jobs, uncovered overwhelming evidence of Billy Wayne’s guilt—and even extracted a full confession. Is Billy Wayne simply trying to tweak the system to garner another fifteen minutes of fame? It’s likely all a game to him, but, if he’s being truthful—someone out there is getting away with multiple murders. How? Why? And most importantly, who?

Dark clouds loom in the Sunshine State.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Third book in a series now seven books in...first one I read...have now read them all.

Is that enough to cause that one-click to go into buy mode? No? Well, retired baseball player and private investigator Jake, his gal-pal Nicole, and dad/employer/owner of investigations agency Ray, land up in a tatty little Florida burg to solve a series of murders...again...as the serial killer who confessed now says there were two he confessed to that were not his crimes. Then he went all coy and refused to say which ones weren't his, or who really committed them. Though he says he knows that, too. And why's he saying it to Ray? Because someone rich wants the truth told about these two crimes. We do not get to know who.

Reluctantly leaving his retirement career as a bar owner—again—while he helps his dad and old friend Pancake (so nicknamed for his astonishing capacity for 'em) look into the likeliest place for a copycat to be found: the one town where three victims were killed not just one.

Nicole is absolutely not a reluctant sidekick, she is an eager participant in this investigation. Her uncle is a rich producer who helps out the scoobygroup by "filming a documentary" about victim's families in the aftermath of a serial killing. Perfect cover, holds up on all checkable points.

What will sell you on the read or repel you from it is the narrative: almost all in Jake's voice, reflecting his moods, reporting his impressions of friend and foe alike. He doesn't stop himself from saying when he thinks one of the friends makes a bonehead mistake to them or to us if he can't to them right away. It's not to everyone's taste. I like it because I like Jake, as when he observes,"The air held a salty must, and a gentle breeze came off the water. The sky was blue and pock-marked with wads of fluffy clouds." It's not poetic, it's a regular guy looking at the world his regular way. It's also exactly like the Gulf Coast.

The main feature that caps my rating at four stars is the fantasy-fulfillment of Nicole being the hot, funny babe who wants sex with Jake All. The. Time. I got adept at recognizing the signs of an impending...romp...and skipped ahead. I'm just not interested in that.


I was interested in the resolution, which surprised me with how well it was misdirected. It's logical; it's not obvious. What more can you ask for?

Fun in the sun for wintertime escape sound good? Here's a series to follow.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RIGGED (Jake Longly #4)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Love triangle—motive for double murder?

First loves are never forgotten. Ever. Certainly not for Tommy "Pancake" Jeffers. His first-kiss, sixth-grade love, Emily, who he has not seen since grammar school, is sliding toward divorce in the artsy Gulf Coast town of Fairhope, Alabama. Longly Investigations has been charged with looking into the finances involved. When Emily doesn't appear for their nervously anticipated meeting, Pancake's radar goes on high alert. Her body, along with that of Jason—one of two guys she has been dating—is found murdered, execution-style, Pancake calls in Jake, Nicole, and Ray.

Who would have done this? Could it be the soon-to-be ex, who has an ironclad alibi; the other guy Emily was seeing—jealousy being a motive for harm; or do the drugs found in Jason's pocket indicate a drug-related hit? That world yields a host of suspects. As they peel back the layers of this idyllic community, dark secrets come to light and convoluted motives and methods of murder are revealed.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: We start with Jake in trouble. An incident at Captain Rocky's, his bar, requires Jake to call in his lawyer (who happens to be the same one who cleaned him out when his ex-wife divorced him) so he needs money. Luckily Ray, his dad, and Pancake, his dad's deputy muscle and Jake's kidhood pal, have a case. Nicole, Jake, and the scoobygroup head to Alabama to find out why Pancake's grade-school crush did not show up for their meeting. The discussion wasn't going to be about their long-ago first kiss but her need to know what her soon-to-be ex-husband is hiding from her financially.

That's a meeting she'd keep if she was on her deathbed. Not if she was dead, though. The way she and her paramour are murdered makes the entire group sit up and take notice. Was she a victim of wrong-place-wrong-time bad luck or do the drugs found on her paramour (one of two...maybe more) show a slightly more sordid side to her death?

Banter, fun asides, a murder to solve that's got more layers than you think it will have...this is what I was hoping and looking for from this series. It's here in abundance, along with icky straight-people sex. I was really amused by the invisible Tammy (Jake's ex) whose presence as a thorn in his side is all telephonic. It is a good way to add very quick hits of comedy that require little set-up but can change a mood immediately.

There is the preponderant first-person PoV from Jake, the expected moments of interpolation from different others in third person, and a satisfying resolution that comes from information the reader has already been given.

A winning entry in a good (oversexed, though) series.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE OC (Jake Longly #5)
D. P. LYLE
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thrill-a-minute crime fiction—infused with wry humor

Restaurant owner and former professional baseball player Jake Longly is hoping for a few weeks of fun with Nicole Jamison in the warm Orange County, CA sun—The OC, baby. After that, they’ll be on their way to LA for the filming of Nicole’s sure-to-be-a-hit screenplay.

On arrival, they discover that Nicole’s friend Megan Weatherly, a local TV reporter, has picked up an anonymous stalker. Megan downplays any real danger, but her new intern Abby, as well as Jake and Nicole, don’t agree. Bit by bit, as the harassment escalates and the shadowy man invades Megan’s world, Jake calls in the big guns from back home in Ray and Pancake. But will Ray’s military black ops experience and Pancake’s technical skills be enough to expose the predator in time?

The stalker is no fool and likely has a predatory history. He makes no mistakes and manages to cover his trail completely. So, how do you identify and locate the untraceable? How do you protect Megan from a potentially lethal phantom?

Suddenly the sunshine and safety of The OC seem more facade than reality. Jake and crew must punch through that facade and dig into the dark world of celebrity stalking. The clock is ticking.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: More daffy fun with the scoobygroup in the sunny surfside locales they favor. Only this time the water's frigid: The Pacific is so huge and so deep it's colder than their usual Gulf of Mexico bathwater warmth even in Southern California.

Pancake shines in more ways than size and muscle this outing. Stalking is a very real problem in the modern world. As Jake and Nicole hit the vacation spots in the OC, they're worried about Nicole's old friend having a stalker in escalation mode. Pancake's cyberskills show that her stalker is very cybersavvy. No usable traces in the threatening emails. Jake's dad Ray dusts off the black-ops military training that got him into the private investigation world in the first place, because everyone except old-friend Megan, who (understandably) tries to cope with the anxiety of being stalked by downplaying it. It's her good luck that everyone around her says "uh-huh" and moves right along investigating the stalking.

It all comes about for the scoobygroup because Nicole's screenplay, sold at last, is now being filmed! Murderwood is coming to life! In this way we're really prepared for Jake to be a plus-one on the entire action. He still narrates a lot of it but is more or less our eyes and ears instead of a mover and shaker. It is not as light-hearted as the earlier entries because the subject isn't really one where too much humor is available. After violence is done it's not retractable, so laughing doesn't feel as...inappropriate, awkward...as when one's trying to prevent violence.

Never fear, series fans, Jake's his irreverent self, only at two-thirds strength. The stalker is identified at last and all is well—it's a series, ma'at must be upheld at both ends—so we don't feel unsatisfied. It's fun; it's darker; it's got Nicole experiencing the moviemaking life at last.

It felt like a good time was had by all, in spite of the crazy person doing crappy things to a woman.

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel, Florida's tryin-to-get-by guys after The Crash

FLORIDA PALMS: A Novel
JOE PAN
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Outsiders meets Sons of Anarchy in this gripping debut about a group of young men dragged into a drug-running operation.

It’s 2009, the height of the Great Recession. Best friends Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse are fresh out of high school and wild at heart, but the economy is in the dumps. With jobs scarce along Florida’s Space Coast, they join a furniture-moving company run by Cueball’s father, a gruff ex-con biker who’s supposedly retired from the fast life. But when a mysterious old boss arrives in town, the payload is switched out, and the young men are coerced into shipping a new designer drug up the East Coast.

What is advertised as a bastion of brotherhood and respect quickly spirals into back-alley deals, bloodshed, and an all-out turf war that will test the bounds of love and friendship. Enticed by larger paychecks, and fueled by burgeoning drug habits, the young friends find themselves trapped between rank opportunists, warring gangsters, meth zombies, crazed bikers, and a blowgun-wielding hitman, all vying for a shot at the big time.

Soaring, ambitious, and deeply humane, Florida Palms is a gritty coming-of-age story with enormous heart and an unflinching vision of the violence and inequities facing forgotten communities. In a relentless race against desperate circumstances, the young friends must fully embrace the crime life or abandon their loyalties and risk ending up face down in the muck of the unforgiving swamps.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Violent and drug-addled, futureless and betrayed at every turn, the young men in this dreadful life of cat-and-mouse with the law (mostly unseen on the page, a faceless enemy), the rival outlaws, and each other, are dead men walking. There's no hope this side of the grave for any of them. It's a game they can't win. Or even walk away from. If you believe in free will, these guys make the worst choices imaginable...but honestly I came away from the read feeling pretty darn sure they're proof, all of 'em, that free will's an illusion.

Because if it isn't, y'all's controlling god is a rotten, evil entity.

Why read it, why finish it, why keep the misery fresh? Because the philosophical soliloquies coming out of these dead-enders' mouths are just *chef's kiss* and there's quite a number of 'em. Equally fun is the occasional character on the page reading CS Lewis or something equally unsuspected. Kaos and Cueball and Eddy, none of these guys made it out, or if they did it wasn't with everything they walked in carrying. The idea of their lives is to have more. And no one tells them "more" has no end, that's how the addictions they supply and live get their hold.

I think four stars is fair because, if it's not original, it's got honesty and clarity and it respects you as a reader. Joe Pan has put out poetry books before, and it shows. A first novel by a poet doesn't usually come this close to being a good story; it's more usual that there's less plot, more ornament. This is good description, good characterization, solid plotting, and only falls a bit short in the last 10%. I'm not sure how else to end it, though, so the fourth star stays whole.

Never a fan of Florida, I'm pretty sure it's not a far-fetched set of events or an outrageous group of guys, so I'm reinforced in my...less than fond...opinion, just as I'd hoped to be. If you're in the mood for some grit lit, here it is with a Florida twist.

THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG, Author Leila Mottley's sophomore novel...worth the wait

THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG
LEILA MOTTLEY
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A worthy follow-up to Mottley's debut novel...link to my 4.5* praise for it is at the top...and one that evokes a strong sense of a place both radically different (cosmetically) and exactly the same as Oakland in Nightcrawling. "No matter where you go, there you are" said Peter Weller in the cult movie with the long title I don't want to type.

Kiara's siblings in trappedness in this book are Adela, Simone, and Emory. Not one scintilla of good luck, or often enough good sense, between 'em. This is what really makes the read come alive for me. These three young women are all pregnant, one again, and teenagers. Their little Peyton-Place-y gossip factory, Padua Beach, has written them off. They gravitate together to give mutual aid and comfort, often as the only source of help for each of them. "Family" is usually best found in this story. They're there for each other because there's no one else willing to do what's needed, more than the minimum anyway.

Not one girl had an abortion; not one impregnator has done one damn helpful thing. Welcome to the world rapist Kavanaugh and christian nutball Coney Barrett were elevated far beyond their capabilities to enable.

You know you're not gettin' away from here without hearing about how stories can and should give the reader a dose of empathy expansion and exercise.

I think the most important reason to read *this* book at *this* moment is that the stories of each narrator are told from her PoV. It's all too frequent for a book on this kind of intimate scale, dealing with this intimate, very personal topic, to be narrated from the outside. Instead Author Mottley chose to tell us the stories of these young women in their own eyes, how it looks to them not someone standing aside, not involved with the necessary action of pregnancy. Of course there is a certain, if not penalty then effect on the narrative pacing. Very like pregnancy itself, the first two-thirds of the young mothers' tale is just slow, it sort of meanders and makes its way through their experiences; and then that last third is non-stop. I'm reluctant to quote lines out of their context because there are spoilers, but believe me: Author Mottley delivers on her literary promise.

If you go into the read forearmed, permaybehaps you won't experience the impatient, finger-tapping sense of "get on with it!" that marked me down as a four-star reader. The last ~125 pages will be well worth your time, I assure you.

We're sliding into some dark days. These three young women are your cicerones to a way out: They are the people we need to focus on helping. Knowing how they feel should make that easier. Anf you'll really enjoy a well-told story.

IF I SURVIVE YOU, available today so RUN! Get you one!

IF I SURVIVE YOU
JONATHAN ESCOFFERY
MCD × FSG
$18.00 trade paper, available now

SHORTLISTED for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award!

Read his "Books That Made Me" Guardian interview.

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”

Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper—himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica—Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.

Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I think about braided-stories novels, there's always a little frisson of fear in my response. I don't always think it's the best idea to try to make a novel out of things that don't fit together naturally. If there's an organic flow among stories, what stops the author from making it into a regular novel-style novel? Why this technique, not another that doesn't make The Market shudder deep in its bones? All we ever hear is that stories are hard to sell, collections are death in the stores, writing stories is just as hard as writing novels but even less remunerative. I'm inured to this cant of can't by now. It's done its damage. I look askance at connected collections.

What, then, is the reason I decided to read this iteration of the story-novel? There's no one thing, there's a constellation of tweaks and trips. I find the idea of books others can't "understand" tempting. I am all for creative uses of the many kinds of English out there waiting to make my acquaintance. I'll walk a mile for a good story about people who just...can't...because they're my people. Because whatever else divides us, we have one thing in common: We don't Belong, and others do. That's worth a lot of effort...which, for the record, I did not think was needed in reading this book. The second story is in patwa but the rest? Not a bit of it.

It pleases me to use my time-honored technique called the Bryce Method to explicate the wonders herein to feast upon.

In Flux is, like so many of these stories, told in the Satanic Second Person, that chest-pokey "you" that's so often a shortcut to getting the reader's defenses down and their sympathy engaged for the object of the story. It can be overused, but this is a short story and it's about seeking identity starting in 1980s Miami (of all the schizophrenic places!) so it's perfectly appropriate. Right down to the chest-pokeyness. It's a meditation on the condition of being Other, it's a jeremiad against the idiocy of American skin-color-itis, it's a serious look at how being in the liminal spaces refuses to be an identity while defining your every move, action, and thought.

You've been thinking about your mother's list of European grands and how your parents still speak so highly of the British school system that educated them, pre-Independence, and you think of all the Rastafarians who extol Ethiopia and Mama Africa. But what you want to know is contemporary middle-class twentysomethings. You want to know how you might feel had your family never left.

What does it mean to be me? isn't fresh ground to till, but it's an evergreen for a reason. We all need an "against" to find our own "for" side. (Trelawney even has a college-time brush with a gay man, *gasp*) I am, therefore I think about this. Where Trelawney ends up, he began...like all the rest of us, really. 4 stars despite the sore chest from the poking

Under the Ackee Tree I have heard others say this is where they got off the train. I found the shift into a mild version of Jamaican English (many Caribbean folk work where I live, I've heard the real unAmericanized version) welcome. Topper's a man whose life wasn't what he wanted or expected. He's no better, no worse than any other man of our generation, just a bog-standard Boomer.

You go out to the patio and wonder why everyone is turned around in them chairs, peering off into the dark, but it then you hear it: loud grunt and dull thud. And you see Trelawney' silhouette under the ackee tree, all with ax in him hands. And him talking to himself now. And him swinging the ax. ... And you wonder if it's you must be defective since you ruin everyone.

It rang true, this exploration about identity that can't ever really be escaped. I felt Topper's uneasy rage, his angry inability to see past his own ideas. He's one of the billions of people who just...stopped. Them whose worlds reached a place and they said "this far...no further." Usually without volition, without awareness, without calculating the cost. There's always a cost so do nothing without knowing what it is and being ready to pay it. 4 stars offered with the fellow-feeling of someone whose day is done

Odd Jobs makes a nonsense of "there are lines I will not cross":

It was elegant, almost, the way they worked in unison. If only my family had found me such a unifying force. I recognized it then, like petrichor, or some misplaced scent from childhood, not the familiar weight of existence crushing my lungs, but the awakening urge, the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.

You know it when it bites you. If it never has...you won't. 4 stars for the honest rawness of stupidity

Pestilence channels the rage, the outrage, that only a less-loved child can summon forth. When the parent is, politely, gormless, the child's rage, outrage, can't ever find a single scrap of release. It festers and rots inside the adult. It never, ever goes away, nor (I say now in my oldness) should it. Few emotions are ever unmixed, none felt in adulthood can be, so that incandescent hating fury is all most of us ever get of the pure, unalloyed aliveness.

And Topper's insensitive, uncaring head deserves that baptism by bile. 4 stars for clarity and fearlessness

Splashdown brings Cukie, a bit player in "Pestilence" above, into the limelight. His long-absent father, Ox (short for "Lennox"), reappears in Daphne's life to get to know Cukie. Daphne, maternal auntie to Trelawney and Delano, isn't much for forgiving Ox. But she needs someone, anyone, to get Cukie away from her, to do what she can't: get him out of his head. Maybe Ox...?

Ox delivers those goods. That's never really a good thing, you know. It leads where you'd expect it to lead.... 4 stars

Independent Living gave me the heebie-jeebies. I've been exactly where those people are...unhoused, no safety net, and no one knows better than Trelawney how the people feel who never once expected to be where they are. And there's Trelawney, making a pittance doing the bidding of the corporate office that cares nothing about the people who live there.

Well...most of the bidding. And not always a good job of it. But there's a line for everyone. One they won't, can't...don't...cross. 4 stars

If He Suspected He'd Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch provides the answer to the question, "who is 'the man who can't catch a break,' Ken?" for once and for all. 4 stars

If I Survive You barely has time to make its case for its closing lines before they become, inexorably and inevitably, the words that no two people ever quite seem to arrive at in the same moment, at the same place.

You feel sad about her sadness, and sad for the both of you because your wounds are not particularly original, however genuine. You tell her what it's like to not be the favorite, to be the opposite of the favorite, and she tells you, "Try being an only child."

After doing things that you can't take back, after behaving in unforgivable ways, after all the seamy, seedy, bad-for-you crap has made you into a battle-worn hulk of emotional flotsam, there is at last no other choice but to follow the only advice we all ignore. Nope, not tellin' ya what it is, but you'll know it when you read it. 4 stars

LIZARD WORLD, a deeply bizarre Bizarro 4-star read

LIZARD WORLD
TERRY RICHARD BAZES
Livingston Press
$11.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dentist from New Jersey, marooned at midnight in the Florida swamps, makes the mistake of falling into the clutches of a hilariously depraved family of amateur surgeons devoted to a seventeenth century libertine whose discovery of an elixir has kept his evil presence alive for the past three-hundred years.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: Three centuries of bizarro nonsense in the Florida swamps, featuring dentists who rob teeth from cadavers or maps from old ladies, English earls with horrifying maladies, German hunchbacks with one-eyed daughters who give rise to a dynasty of detestable Southern crackers, and a buncha buncha croakadells. (Gators to thee and me.)

Oh, and fiction's only known were-horsefly.

Not a big bizarro reader, me. I wondered sometimes what I was doing wandering in the humid swamps of Bazes' imagination. I found such repulsive images there as people being farmed for their organs, clouds of gator-musk inspiring ick-ptui sex, and a claustrophobic sense on nausalgia vu...the dear and familiar stomach-roiling horror of having been here before...that Florida inspires in me.

So why rate it so highly? Because, dear reader, in an increasingly bland and featureless literary and cultural landscape, where gay couples are the normal ones on TV and wacky neighbors on sitcoms are largely indistinguishable from the leads in a vain attempt to spice things up, Bazes takes us into places we haven't been taken since A Modest Proposal. The adjective "Swiftian" has been waiting for this book for many long, lonely years.

So, go buy it. I promise you no one will fail to remark on the unique cover art, and the erudite among your acquaintance will be gobsmacked by the fact the BARNEY ROSSET blurbed it. (Frankly, after one repugnant scene involving a wire hair brush and the aforementioned were-horsefly, this was the only reason I kept reading.) Oh, so did Charles Palliser and Peter Coyote, but BARNEY! If not for him, we wouldn't have smutty books to read at all!

Enjoy.