TAILED is the third book to feature Brian M. Wiprud’s character of Garth Carson, but no need to worry if you haven’t read any of the other two. All are stories that stand by themselves, with only a little bit of minor continuity.

Garth works for a insurance company examining taxidermy collections, and he has been asked to examine one belonging to a football player/big-game hunter. When he arrives at the estate, there is no one to great him, so he presses on into the home, only to make a grisly discovery: the owner is dead, and from the looks of it, killed by his own stuffed bear paw.

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Our monthly depressing look at the search terms that bring pervs to BOOKGASM!

On the first page of Matt Richtel’s debut novel, a man at a Starbucks-esque coffee bar is handed a note that tells him to “Get out of the café – NOW!” One line after he reads it, the place explodes.

No wonder this thing is titled HOOKED.

Thanks to the note, health journalist Nat Idle is one of the lucky survivors of the explosion. Was it an act of terrorism? Why was he forewarned? And isn’t it weird that the attractive woman who slipped him the note reminded him of his girlfriend, who died in a boating accident four years prior?

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It’s kind of disheartening to know that teenage cliques will remain alive and well in the 30th century, and few are as snobby as the one on display in SHOWCASE PRESENTS LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES: VOLUME 1.

Like a malt-shop arm of the Justice League, the Legion is comprised of vibrant Aryan youths with incredible crimefighting powers. For instance, Bouncing Boy can, um, inflate and bounce; Triplicate Girl can, er, divide into three versions of herself; and Cosmic Boy can … well, I can’t remember, but I’m sure it’s awfully keen and strikes danger in the hearts of bad guys everywhere.

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Dean Koontz is the master of the high-concept thriller, cranking out novels whose devilishly clever, insta-hook scenarios can be described in one sentence. In the case of THE GOOD GUY, it’s this: Mistaken for a hitman, an Everyman is given $10,000 and instructions to kill a woman.

That Everyman is Tim Carrier, a bricklayer by trade winding down after a hard day’s work at his best friend’s bar. A mysterious man sidles up beside him with a bag of dough, a photograph and tells him it’s on. In disbelief, Tim plays along for a moment, but by the time he reveals he’s not who they think he is, it’s far, far too late.

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Yep, it’s another spy-rific spectacular, but if you’re expecting some of the usual suspects, sorry to disappoint. This week, I’m covering three authors new to this column, all of whom have their own series, whether long-running or short-lived.

THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM by Adam Hall – This is the first in the lengthy Quiller series. The only thing we know about our hero is his code name: Quiller. He’s just finished a six-month assignment in Germany when he’s approached by one of his contacts for another job. It seems Quiller is a bit of a Nazi hunter, and he’s told of rumblings regarding some former Nazis still in Germany, so Quiller begins a quest to infiltrate the group. But everywhere he goes, people die.

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All the news that’s fit to capsulize!

FLY AIR HOFF!
David Hasselhoff has a book out. It’s an autobiography called DON’T HASSEL THE HOFF. Don’t care? What if I told you publisher St. Martin’s celebrates said release with your very own printable David Hasselhoff paper airplane? Yeah, I thought so!

SHE MUST BE STOPPED!
For anyone else who has long suspected that Amazon’s “#1 reviewer” Harriet Klausner doesn’t even read the books she reviews, this Dayton Daily News article is a must-read.

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Getting a new Bryant & May mystery is a drop-everything-else affair. Over the past few years, with very little fanfare, Christopher Fowler’s series on the British senior-citizen detective duo quietly has shaped itself into the most original and imaginative mystery franchise on shelves today.

As their fifth adventure WHITE CORRIDOR opens, Bryant & May find their Peculiar Crimes Unit being shut down for a week for improvements, so they utilize the opportunity – Bryant willingly, May reluctantly – to attend a spiritualists convention. Snowy travel conditions, however, strand them in a blizzard so bad it’s downright life-threatening.

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I started Claire Matturro’s BONE VALLEY with some trepidation. She had written a ravingly positive blurb for a book I really didn’t like. And the hippie-dippie holier-than-thou stances of her protagonist didn’t sit very well with me. But once I let a few preconceptions go and started reading, what emerged is a pretty darn fun and tightly plotted novel of suspense that has a solid bedrock of fascinating fact as background.

Attorney Lilly Cleary is a high-profile lawyer, one used to winning big, profitable cases. So it seems odd that she’s stuck defending two small-time environmental activists who are being sued for libeling an orange grower. But one of the activists ends up being killed by a bomb. And then a man who is deeply involved in phosphate mining, and not at all keen on the environment, is found dead with his head submerged in a gyp stack.

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Supposedly, there’s a sign above the doors to Hell that reads, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” There needs to be a sign at the top of this graphic novel that reads, “Here’s that hope for comics you’ve been looking for,” because HELLCITY is one hell of an awesome book.

Taking place in Hell, natch, we’re introduced to a skewed, mirror image of New York, where life is made irritatingly difficult by demons – for example, the doorman to your building slams the door on you as you walk in, or a random demon squats up and down the street, unavoidably crapping all over the sidewalk. It’s a walking nightmare from which no one ever will wake.

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In mid-April, Ted Dekker spent a day in Oklahoma City meeting area booksellers and pushing his latest thriller, SKIN – his first to land on the New York Times bestseller list. I met Dekker over lunch at OKC’s ever-popular Iron Starr Urban BBQ – he had ribs, I had a burger topped with chili and smoked sausage – and we talked about his rising career as a full-time novelist, particularly SKIN’s switch in bookstore placement from the Christian fiction shelf to the one for all mainstream thrillers. The following represents just a few choice passages from more than an hour of conversation.

BOOKGASM: The first thing I wanted to ask you is if SKIN’s move away from the evangelical was deliberate. Because I noticed it.

DEKKER: The only difference between SKIN and some of my other novels is that the subject matter is more general: truth and beauty. SKIN is more of a straightforward thriller. It has no Christianity in it at all, but neither do some of my other novels. That’s kind of how my novels are and that’s how they’ll be stocked from now on. All will be sold and marketed in Christian bookstores, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders.

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One only can imagine the creative meetings at DC Comics during the early 1960s that today have resulted in SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE WAR THAT TIME FORGOT: VOLUME 1…

“You know what our STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES issues need?”

“More soldiers and tanks and planes?”

“No, dinosaurs!”

Yes, DC decided the best way to pull off a war comic some four decades ago was to have our American troops fight prehistoric creatures. It’s a concept that would’ve been great for one story – perhaps one whole issue – but six years?

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One of the surprise movie hits of early 2007 is a teen variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW called DISTURBIA. The title is a hybrid of “disturb” and “suburbia,” and the picture’s tagline is: “Every killer lives next door to someone.”

According to Sam Stall’s SUBURBAN LEGENDS: TRUE TALES OF MURDER, MAYHEM, AND MINIVANS, it’s not just killers that put the “brrrrr” in “suburban.” To hear him tell it, America’s small towns and bedroom communities are jam-packed with ghosts, disguised aliens, poltergeists, cryptozoological monsters, gardens/basements/walls hiding rotting corpses, and enough sickening depravity to make Eli Roth reach for a barf bag.

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It’s that time of year when I can finally break out the shorts and sit in the sun. Instead of enjoying the beach, though, I’ll be reading on my porch. So let’s have some fun in the sun with three books bringing the idea of bikinis and guns to the forefront, which is how it should be.

KANE’S WAR #6: DEAD HEAT by Nick Stone – That cover screams two words: “Hello, sailor!” Now that I’ve covered the best part of this 1988 novel, let’s get to the meat of the matter: a story populated with overdescriptive passages about the kinds of boats and all their accessories. If they cut out all those passages, the book would have been mercifully shorter.

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Think you had a busy weekend? Not compared to the criminals and cops that populate THE WHEELMAN, a go-for-broke, gangbusters crime tale from Duane Swierczynski.

It begins, as more thrillers should, with the accelerator pushed to the floor and engines firing on all cylinders. Irish, mute getaway driver Lennon attempts an escape from a Philadelphia bank robbery his partners have just pulled – but only barely – making off with a hefty $650,000 take. They leave their loot in the trunk of a car in a public lot until things cool down.

Things never cool down.

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“Hey, you got your corpses on my girls!”

“Well, you got your girls on my corpses!”

And that was the conversation that I imagined had to be the impetus behind the sickly comical new mag Girls and Corpses, which, in case you couldn’t figure it out for yourself, is all about hot girls cavorting with musty ol’ dead bodies. It actually would be necro-whacking material if it weren’t so damn funny. (Granted, I’m sure there are a few necros who do spank to it.)

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Jim Butcher’s WHITE NIGHT – the ninth entry in his “Dresden Files” series and the first since the premiere of the Sci Fi Channel series – finds everyone’s favorite VW-driving Chicago detective/wizard being asked to give his opinion on an apparent suicide scene involving a woman found dead in her apartment.

There’s a note left behind, as well as an empty prescription bottle, but still the evidence strikes him as too orderly to be a suicide – a theory proven correct when he uses a spell to reveal a message the killer left behind. Namely, the Bible verse Exodus 22:18: “Suffer not a witch to live.”

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I’m glad there’s no Half Price Books anywhere near my Oklahoma City home, because I might be broke if there were.

Earlier this spring, while in Austin, Texas – auditioning for a game show with friends in a desperate and ultimately failed bid at easy fortune –  we went not once, but twice, to Half Price Books. I’d been to an HPB only once before, a couple summers ago in Dallas, and it was like book heaven.

Granted, they have tons of used books that are mutilated and sticky like everyone else, but what I like are the stacks of publisher’s remainder books, usually in perfect shape and marked down to criminally low prices. Luckily, I found a bunch of virtual steals…

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Tim Curran’s waterborne DEAD SEA is the story of the Mara Corday, a 720-foot container ship on a three-week voyage. Among its small crew is George Ryan – a virgin to trolling ocean waters – and he’s about to get quite an indoctrination once the boat enters an abnormal mist. As a result, one guy goes crazy and throws himself overboard. Then things get weird.

The ship comes under attack by a giant worm; later, the craft explodes, leaving some floating on a hatch door, others in a lifeboat. The horrors don’t end with the shipwreck, either, as odd noises sound, serpentine fish surface, devil-ray bats swoop in and shark-like creatures circle, ready to strip the men from skin to skeleton.

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With the recent relaunch of The Destroyer line, the fine folks at Forge also have released THE BEST OF THE DESTROYER, an omnibus collection of what many consider three of the best in the early run of Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s series starring Remo Williams. These were all picked by Murphy, who contributes a new introduction. Also included are the original ’80s introductions for the first two novels, with a counterpoint from a certain Korean.

Up first is CHINESE PUZZLE; although the third in the series, it’s considered by many to be the true start, since it was the first to really get things right, from the banter between Remo and mentor Chiun to the nonstop action we’ve all come to expect.

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