A Nasty Piece of Work

A Nasty Piece of Work is a very pleasing PI novel in which our ex-cop and sometime CIA operative, now living in a trailer in New Mexico, is approached by a client who’s helping her uncle run a bail-bond business. One of their customers has skipped town. What makes this disappearance unusual is that all the photographs of this man, including the mugshots taken by the police, have disappeared. To compound the mystery, it seems this is a man who needed a very good reason to disappear and staged his own arrest so he could go on the run.

The resulting chase is great fun as our hero and the attractive young lady find themselves in the middle of a major feud with serious risk to life and limb on all sides. Although it adopts the tried and trusted pulp tropes of tough PI, attractive dame as the client, and dangerous heavies lurking in the shadows, this has a modern sensibility about it and contrives to keep the plot turning over with plenty of excitement and one or two unexpected developments to keep our hero working hard until the last page.