Award-winning and bestselling author William Kotzwinkle is back with the second in the darkly comedic Felonious Monk series featuring Tommy Martini, a Benedictine monk with an anger management problem. Felonious Monk was praised as “amiably satirical” (Washington Post) and “a whiplash adventure” (Wall Street Journal).
Coalville is on fire—from below. The old mines are burning, and everyone has poison gas in their brain. Maybe that’s why the town is so corrupt. Now that he’s a Benedictine monk, Tommy Martini never wants to see the place again—hell-raisers there hold a grudge till they die, and he’s on their wish list. But a girl he once loved has gone missing, and his best friend from childhood has been murdered. Among the living is a shy girl from Tommy’s past, who wants to help. Together, they learn the secret of the elephant’s graveyard, and it’s not in Africa.
At the heart of Coalville is Parade Square, with plenty of pigeons, drugs, and child prostitution. It’s the new small-town America, where Dionysus is dancing once again. William Kotzwinkle’s insight into this paradigm shift is shot through with the humor he is famous for, and the result is a spicy brew, a bloody martini—just one sip may keep you up all night.
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“The unflinching Zen master of all trades in fiction reveals some of his best, most disarming magic in the epic sequel to Felonious Monk, proving again that no one does a gumshoe thriller quite like William Kotzwinkle. Here is a damn-near miraculous and grimly hilarious two-gun rocket ride through a mystic labyrinth of passion and crime, populated by a seemingly never-ending cast of quirky guys and dangerous dames, sadistic gangsters and salacious street toughs—there’s even a Kung Fu hairdresser!—all running on fumes from hell’s own refinery, circled by the one man who might save them, and yet is the most tragic and fated of all: the renegade monk Tommy Martini. In Kotzwinkle’s masterful hands and through Tommy’s unflinching eyes, we face the evils of our times and the most desperate and important questions of god and man in a constant battle for our own soul, all the while taking it on the chin for so many other sinners. From its first explosive chapter to the last stunning sentence, Bloody Martini is a tour-de-force that will force you to stay up very late, gazing deep into a black, yet profoundly illuminating night.”
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Stephen Romano, author of Resurrection Express and The Riot Act