"Don't you get a little tired working so hard to be folksy?" Hap Collins asks a colorful, clod-kicking private eye named Jim Bob Luke. "Naw," Jim Bob tells him. "I figure it's kind of an edge. People don't know what you're really thinking. They think you're just a shallow good ole boy." Nobody would ever think that about Collins, who looks like a long-haired '70s dropout and is seriously worried about the quality of his life. With his best buddy Leonard Pine--who aside from being black and gay is extremely tough and nasty in a firefight--Hap goes after the biker who first stole and then killed Pine's boyfriend. Jim Bob also gets involved in the chase, which converges on a corrupt local chili entrepreneur and a totally convincing Texas tornado. Two other Hap Collins books, Mucho Mojo and The Two-Bear Mambo, are available in paperback.


The New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio
The mayhem is always flashy in these Texas Gothics, and the foulmouthed jokes would keep a crew of oil riggers in stitches. But there's more true art in the loopy bar conversations and front-porch anecdotes that Lansdale tosses back like peanuts.


From Booklist
Leonard Pine is distraught. His lover, Raul, has left him for a biker. Leonard's pal and sleuthing partner, Hap Collins, wants to be there for his buddy, but before Hap can help, the biker is found headless. Leonard is quickly dismissed as a suspect, but then Raul's body is discovered, extensively tortured. Clearly, the LaBorde, Texas, police department has no interest in solving what is viewed only as a homosexual killing. Leonard can't let it go. He and Hap descend into a vortex of police corruption, gay bashing for video profit, and a truly bizarre business scam, all masterminded by the local chili king. Lansdale is in top form with this latest Collins-Pine caper. Where else in the mystery world could one find a plot that hinges on the big money to be made in recycled restaurant grease--and, as an aside, a critique of the Gilligan's Island reunion movie. Lansdale is politically correct one minute and politically incorrect the next, simultaneously funny and tragic, and wildly profane yet invariably humane. In his unique way, he reveals the human condition--our darkest secrets and our proudest moments, all within the unlikely confines of an East Texas adventure featuring the two scruffiest protagonists in modern crime fiction. Wes Lukowsky


From Kirkus Reviews
Think your love life is complicated? Leonard Pine, fired from his job as the Hot Cat Club's bouncer (don't ask why), is mopey because his boyfriend Raul has taken a shine to biker Horse McNee. After threatening and cold-cocking the Other Man, Leonard is naturally the number one suspect when Horse is found in his car, run off the road, shotgunned to death by a weapon a lot like Leonard's--though Lt. Charlie Blank has no way of comparing them until he finds out where Leonard's hiding. Leonard's only hope is his old buddy Hap Collins, who's just started his own little romance with Brett Sawyer, the forthright night nurse who offers to give him a shot in the rear while he's in the hospital getting treated for rabies (don't ask why). Raul seems to be the man to find, Hap and Leonard agree during an unauthorized sabbatical that Hap's taking from the hospital--and find him they do, hideously tortured, presumably by the gang of video artists whose line of gay stalk-and-rape tapes is headlined by Kickin' Fairies, which Hap and Leonard have been lucky enough to purchase. Jim Bob Luke, a can-do shamus visiting LaBorde to avenge one of the video victims, is convinced the ringleader is Charles Arthur, the Chili King; Hap isn't so sure. What everybody agrees on, though, is that the gay-bashing auteurs really want that incriminating videotape back, and they don't care what they have to do to get it. Hap's effortless talent as a downscale East Texas raconteur (The Two-Bear Mambo, 1995, etc.) makes him the funniest of Travis McGee's widely dispersed sons, even when he's writing about truly menacing bad guys. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Download Description
A leather-jacketed, hog-riding biker is dead. Leonard Pine is the suspect. To help his partner in the case of one murdered lowlife, Hap Collins won't be bending the law, he'll be stomping the hell out of it. Spicing the mix will be LaBorde's own Chili King, a woman in white with a dark past, an actual tornado, several dead bodies in unwelcome places, and an unpleasant experience involving blocks of ice and car batteries. Not to mention the matter of one rabid squirrel.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Hap Collins is home, fresh from his stint on an offshore oil rig, bright with determination to change his life. Back in LaBorde, he finds his friend Leonard Pine grieving over the breakup of his affair with his lover Raul. Then things get serious. A local roughneck by the name of Horse Dick is dead and Leonard is implicated. Not surprisingly, the law is little use. To help his partner, Hap won't be bending the law, he'll be stomping the hell out of it. But Hap has always had to do things he doesn't like. What he does like - a lot - is Brett Sawyer, a nurse and a woman with her own past.

SYNOPSIS

Hap and Leonard are back! Fresh on the cult-inspiring success of Mucho Mojo and The Two-Bear Mambo, Joe R. Lansdale, East Texas's most stellar mythic chronicler, returns with this triumph--an adventure told in the darkly suspenseful mode, leavened with postmodern good ol' boy humor, that forms the Lansdale signature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The opening attack of a rabid squirrel leaves Hap Collins, returning from Mucho Mojo and Two-Bear Mambo, with a prescription for a series of shots. Luckily, Nurse Brett is a doll, albeit somewhat foul-mouthed. Hap and his tough, gay, black sidekick Leonard Pine drive another brutally funny R-rated crime caper in picturesque East Texas. Leonard's lover, Raul, has left him for a biker called Horse Dick, whose subsequent death by shotgun is attributed to Leonard. Another death and the news that Horse Dick had a hidden identity revs up Hap's investigation. The trail he and Leonard follow leads to one weird scheme to sell restaurant grease on the black market and another one involving videos of young gay men being realistically beaten up. The cast of likely criminals includes a chili magnate; a former professional wrestler who enjoys applying electricity to tender male body parts, including Hap's; a hairdresser with a suspicious French accent; and the unforgettable Jim Bob Luke, a rough-edged PI who makes Leonard look like a sissy. Brett is probably overwritten some, and her supposed demise isn't slightly believable, but the rest of the narrative, including a breathless finale, is droll, crude, touching and very nasty. Lansdale elicits at least one good chuckle per page, and there may be no living author who commands more vernacular terms for the myriad sexual acts available to consenting and non-consenting adults. In this author's hands, extravagant, lovable characters mix with outrageous, despicable actions to irresistible effect. Major ad/promo.(Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

Think your love life is complicated? Leonard Pine, fired from his job as the Hot Cat Club's bouncer (don't ask why), is mopey because his boyfriend Raul has taken a shine to biker Horse McNee. After threatening and cold-cocking the Other Man, Leonard is naturally the number one suspect when Horse is found in his car, run off the road, shotgunned to death by a weapon a lot like Leonard's—though Lt. Charlie Blank has no way of comparing them until he finds out where Leonard's hiding. Leonard's only hope is his old buddy Hap Collins, who's just started his own little romance with Brett Sawyer, the forthright night nurse who offers to give him a shot in the rear while he's in the hospital getting treated for rabies (don't ask why). Raul seems to be the man to find, Hap and Leonard agree during an unauthorized sabbatical that Hap's taking from the hospital—and find him they do, hideously tortured, presumably by the gang of video artists whose line of gay stalk-and-rape tapes is headlined by Kickin' Fairies, which Hap and Leonard have been lucky enough to purchase. Jim Bob Luke, a can-do shamus visiting LaBorde to avenge one of the video victims, is convinced the ringleader is Charles Arthur, the Chili King; Hap isn't so sure. What everybody agrees on, though, is that the gay-bashing auteurs really want that incriminating videotape back, and they don't care what they have to do to get it.

Hap's effortless talent as a downscale East Texas raconteur (The Two-Bear Mambo, 1995, etc.) makes him the funniest of Travis McGee's widely dispersed sons, even when he's writing about truly menacing bad guys.