Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt, a vampire detective living in a New York City that’s filthy with bloodsucking clans and factions, never seems to catch a break. Ever since the first Pitt book, 2005′s ALREADY DEAD, Joe’s gotten nothing but abuse and indignity for his hard work, and every victory is a pyrrhic one. But what’s bad for Pitt is great for readers, as EVERY LAST DROP, the fourth book in the series, demonstrates.
EVERY LAST DROP opens with Pitt exiled to the Bronx, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he gets pulled back into vampire politics — and a brutal torturing — within the first dozen or so pages. As he tries to recapture the only thing that means anything to him, he uses or is used by nearly every black hat and ne’er-do-well that he wronged in his undead existence, and uncovers some seriously disturbing truths about the city-state in which he lives.
There’s a new faction in NYC, and it’s trying to find a cure for the virus that makes vampires vampires. While Pitt gathers intelligence on them, he stumbles on some secrets and lays the seeds for his own endgame, which, if there’s another installment in the series, is probably not going to end well for anyone (or the world, for that matter).
It’s a relatively short book, like all of Huston’s Pitt books, so the fewer plot point given away here, the better. The absolute best aspect of EVERY LAST DROP is the author’s never-wavering dedication to making Pitt’s life an undead hell, stuffed with shades-of-gray choices and brutal, bloody conflict. Such commitment is rare: By this point, the Joe Pitt books probably have a pretty good following, and lesser authors would probably see some financial sense in turning this series into a full-on franchise, with self-contained stories that wrap up neatly at the end with little consequence for the ever-immortal and successful protagonist.
Remember when Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books were relevant? They were short, eventful and had plots with a meaningful impact on the main character’s life. But a little more than 20 years ago, it became a goddamn franchise, and save a couple of entries, each plot had less and less consequence. Pitt doesn’t have much of a future at the rate he’s going, and if Huston sticks to his guns, Pitt could very easily run out of limbs before he gets soft in his immortal old age.
Huston’s mastery of the noir style is still in full effect. The prose is restrained, but his descriptions are brutal, horrifying and concise. His casual, vicious descriptive style bring presence and immediacy to Pitt’s world — all of the characters are motivated and real, and the New York of EVERY LAST DROP is believable and horrible.
People who haven’t read any of Huston’s earlier vampire books and are fans of crime, detectives, vampires and the rich tradition of noir fiction — or any combination of the above — should pick up ALREADY DEAD and start from there, because it’s a sure thing. Fans of the series will get more of what they love here: unflinching, hard-edged, top-shelf fiction that pushes all the right genre buttons and explores a disturbing undead existence to a degree that’s rarely seen.
For everyone sick to death of fabulously coiffed, ennui-obsessed “vampires” of the TWILIGHT books and movie, and the emasculated, effete vampires that so many people seem obsessed with nowadays, EVERY LAST DROP is the remedy. —Ryun Patterson
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ALREADY DEAD by Charlie Huston
• HALF THE BLOOD OF BROOKLYN by Charlie Huston
• NO DOMINION by Charlie Huston
Related posts:
- No Dominion
- Already Dead
- Half the Blood of Brooklyn
- Drop Shot
- 30 Days of Night: Rumors of the Undead
