"I want you to kill my stepdad."
I kick my feet off my desk and lean forward, rucking my brow. "Say that again, kid?"
Usually, it's dames trussed up in whalebone and lace that come slinking through my door. Or, as is more often the case these days, femmes fatales in Jimmy Choos and Armani knockoffs. The pipsqueak in my office is new, and I'm not sure I like his brand of new. He's young, maybe a rawboned eleven, but he has the stare of someone three times his age and something twice as dangerous.

When the literal opening lines of the book have me grinning in excitement like they did, I knew I didn't stand a chance at putting this book down. What follows is a short but concise story in the form of a deluge of hard-boiled/noir tropes and classic Lovecraftian references. This really was just a satisfying marriage of two distinct genres that came from a place of appreciation instead of parody. If I could only use two words to sum this book up, they'd be "efficient" and "fun".

"Efficient," because there really isn't a wasted scene or sentence really. It's just pedal-to-the-floor right from the start, but not in a way that's exhausting. A tight cast that doesn't overstay it's welcome, a setup, a twist, a betrayal, and a resolution all in just about a hundred pages is damned impressive if you ask me.

And "fun" because it was just that. Content notwithstanding of course; there are mentions of child abuse, murder, and "Jesus Christ that's messed up"-body horror, but they're not the point of the scenes they're present in. No, I mean fun in the sense that we get to watch our not-entirely-human-but-don't-worry-about-it protagonist use his skills to learn what he can before even deciding to take the job, and those information-gathering scenes have an amusing supernatural twist to them. If even just your rising action setup scenes are enjoyable, you're doing something right.

Also I'm just a sucker for these kinds of lines:

The street is getting dark, the pavement tiger-striped by halogen. It wears the fog like a dame's best scarf, slightly jaunty, with an edge of challenge.

Night comes. Real night. Not just the chronological byproduct of Earth pirouetting around the sun, but a blackness that shoves the lizard brain nose first into the dirt and hisses for caution.

chef's kiss If a 500 page, life-changing novel is a full course meal, then this book was a bag of chips. And sometimes you just want a bag of chips.