Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Devil Red by Joe R. Lansdale

(hb; 2011: ninth book in the Hap and Leonard series)

From the inside flap:

"Hap Collins and Leonard Pine return in a red-hot, mayhem-fueled thriller to face a vampire cult, the Dixie Mafia, and the deadliest assassin they’ve ever encountered—Devil Red.

"When their friend Marvin asks Hap and Leonard to look into a cold-case double homicide, they’re more than happy to play private investigators: they like trouble, and they especially like getting paid to find it. It turns out that both of the victims were set to inherit serious money, and one of them ran with a vampire cult. The more closely Hap and Leonard look over the crime-scene photos, the more they see, including the image of a red devil’s head painted on a tree. A little research turns up a slew of murders with that same fiendish signature. And if that’s not enough, Leonard has taken to wearing a deerstalker cap . . . Will this be the case that finally sends Hap over the edge?"



Review:

Devil Red is another hard-to-set-down, superb book in the Hap and Leonard series, full of lively, character-veracious banter, romance and sex, vicious bad guys, action and gore. Like previous Hap novels, Devil 's action, banter and characters' decisions stem from the events and characters from the book before it (in this case, Vanilla Ride), with all the elements that make Lansdale's books so entertaining: raw violence, humor, sex and romance, friendship, with a few plot twists thrown into its successful blend. The plot corkscrews are not always unexpected, but they work -- again, Lansdale's work is worth purchasing.

Followed by Hyenas.

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