Mystery with occult theme - wise-cracking actor and his assorted odd friends save the world from evil.
A dark fun read
A dark fun read
I'm afraid I haven't read this book, so what follows is the Kirkus review. I did read Russell's earlier romp, Celestial Dogs, starring the same Marty Burns, who---like many great leading men in the history of mystery-suspense-thriller stories---is a soft touch for a lost cause. No way is this the spare, realistic world of a Chandler or Hammett, though: if this 2nd Marty Burns tale is anything like the 1st, and I'm pretty sure it is, look for warped, off-kilter intrustions of the supernatural that affect Marty and his buds in ways that are alternately horrific and hilarious. It's the kind of comic fiction that I prefer: not a thin, silly gruel, but chewy and rich with danger, action, intensity and darkness.
From Kirkus Reviews:
From Kirkus Reviews:
Marty Burns, his long-dormant TV career re surrected by his heroic handling of snuff king Jack Rippen (Celestial Dogs, 1997), is in England to promote his new series. He thinks his biggest problems are segueing from Jack Rippen to still another series on Jack the Ripper and persuading somebody tor put a bottle of British beer in the fridge. But a brick painstakingly labeled "Ultima Thule"---"the end of all things"---lobbed through the window of an Indian restaurant where Marty is peacefully eating lunch is only the first sign of larger-scale troubles: namely, a racist-neo-Nazi-skinhead-forces-of-indescribable-evil conspiracy to destroy the forces of goodness and thus ring in the Apocalypse. Can a frenzied tour of Britain's most storied sites of mythic power---Canterbury, Tintagel Castle, Dwarfie Stane---keep the armies of darkness at bay? Menaced at every turn by yobbos, bigots, spies, and heavily armed underlings, Marty and the Third World friends whose cause he's taken to his heart would be history if they weren't rescued by a fortuitous stream of militant lesbians, midgets, and voudoun priests, with the occasional tzaddik and patron deities of several competing cosmologies for additional support. Mystery fans may share Marty's feeling that they've paid for a John Woo action flick but gotten a Bulgarian art film with no subtitles (except, of course, for Marty's trademark blather). But devotees of the supernatural-horror-comedy-mystery should be in seventh heaven.Are you psyched? =laugh=
---Copyright (c) 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
