Category: Books

That’s a candid of Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins.  If you’re a fan of either you’ll want to check out Crimespree’s recent interview with Max Allan Collins.

Upgunned by David J. Schow

Jacket design and illustration Tim Bradstreet

Elias McCabe is having one hell of a night:  He gets kidnapped at gunpoint by a professional hit man and is forced to shoot blackmail photos of a prominent politician.  Things go wrong with the shoot… very wrong.  When the night is over, Elias is scared to death … and ten thousand dollars richer.

If he keeps his mouth shut.

But he doesn’t — and now the hit man has targeted him for payback.

As a desperate amateur in the games of death, Elias is up against a seasoned pro.  As his entire life slides into the abyss, he has to stay alive by inventing new ways, moment-by-moment, to avoid, misdirect, and finally confront his ever-more-determined murderer as corpses and collateral damage stack up coast-to-coast in their wake.

The Good

• Upgunned sucks you in from the first sentence and never let’s up.

• The lead characters:  Initially I was having a tough time deciding whether I was pulling for Elias [the photographer forced to become an accessory to blackmail and murder] or Chambers [the hitman “forced” to kill everyone involved in the blackmail gone bad including his partners].

• The supporting characters, especially “Cap” Weatherwax and the freaks at Salon [midgets, a spidergirl, a crocman, and others.]

• Schow does his research — you’ll learn a lot about guns, Hollywood movie-making and more, but never at the expense of the action.

• Tim Bradstreet’s jacket design and illustration and yes, that is Thomas Jane on the cover!

• Ken Mitchrooney [a comic book buddy from way back] is thanked in the Acknowledgements.

The Bad:

• Chambers – I was pulling for the hitman despite him killing so many people until he did something even worse.

• What happens to Chambers that prevents him from killing Elias straight away.

The Ugly:

• What happens to Chambers’ partners.

• Walking in a dark room with your eyes wide open.

Upgunned is for mature audiences due to excessive violence and sexual situations. 

Rating: 3 out of 5

Jake Hinkson the author of the highly recommended Hell on Church Street, The Posthumous Man and Saint Homicide is the subject of an interview at CrimeSpree.

Hinkson talks about his influences, growing up in the South, his love of old films and more.

Here are a couple of quotes to entice you to click over…

Hardboiled crime fiction is about toughness. Noir is about weakness.

With Hell On Church Street, I found the voice of the main character right away. It jumped right out of me. I just loved the duality of Geoffrey Webb, his surface politeness and deep-seated contempt.

With The Posthumous Man, the voice of the main character was tricky because he’s a guy who, as the story begins, has just tried to commit suicide…. He dies in the emergency room for three minutes, and then wakes up to find that he has this bizarre second chance presented to him in the person of a deeply troubled nurse. He’s more philosophical than emotionally frazzled. I mean, after you’ve been dead, what’s there to be frazzled about?

There’s a line in Saint Homicide where Daniel says, “I simply don’t know what religion means to people for whom it doesn’t mean everything.”

His name is Daniel.  The other cons call him Saint Homicide.

Daniel is a religious man.  To say that he is being tested, if you believe in such a thing, is an understatement.  As Daniel lays out his story you see how a man of God who is a faithful hardworking and devoted husband becomes a cold-blooded killer.  

Daniel isn’t on a slow spiral out of control, he’s on a runaway freight train to destruction and just as Daniel can’t stop what’s about to happen, you as a reader won’t be able to stop turning pages.

Jake Hinkson has the ability to draw us into a world that most would never want to inhabit.  When our lives cross paths with others like Daniel we sometimes think, there but for the grace of God…  in Daniel’s case he believes that it is the grace of God that brought him to be a convicted murderer sitting in a prison cell.

As Daniel lays out his story we discover that Daniel has always been a religious man and one who stood up for his beliefs no matter the cost.  While others see him as a fanatic, Daniel knows he is a servant of God.  Daniel believes by telling his story, “by honestly transcribing blasphemies, rough language, and ugly situations as they occurred” he is “creating a testament to the glory of Christ.”

So we learn about Daniel’s hatred of abortionists and how this brought about the loss of his job as a college professor.  We wonder how Daniel, now jobless, will take care of his wife who still suffers from injuries that have left her not only physically scarred but mentally diminished.

The pressure continues to build so that when Daniel agrees to go looking for his young sister-in-law who may have run off with a thug, we know that things are not going to end well.  And they don’t.

This novella is not for the feint of heart or younger readers, but if you’re a fan of crime fiction and noir my guess is you’ll really dig this.  My only complaint is that it ended too soon.  I wanted more.  Of course, isn’t that what good authors do… leave their readers wanting more?

I’m a Jake Hinkson fan.  And like Hell on Church Street and The Posthumous Man, I recommend Saint Homicide and will look forward to Hinson’s next novel(la).

Rating: 3 out of 5