Rating: 
Summary: A Wild Ride
Review: I've been a fan of Brian A. Hopkins's short fiction for years. He has a way of bringing the reader into the depths of a character's mind and soul, whether they want to be there or not. I find myself being dropped into his stories, rather than simply reading them. You don't even know it's happening until you're done, and exhausted. It's a sure sign of a smooth and confident writing style. However, picking up Brian's first full-length novel, I didn't know what to expect. I mean, with a title like The Licking Valley Coon Hunter's Club, I had to assume it was going to be a LITTLE lighter than his usual fare. My assumption was correct, but the crisp writing, the feeling that you, as the reader, are in the story rather than simply an outsider, is there as much as ever.
Without rehashing the plot as earlier reviews have done, I WILL say that this book starts with a bang, grabs you by the hair and drags you along on one of the most bizarre and wild adventures I've read in a long time. I was bruised and bullied as badly as Mr. Zolotow, and loved every minute of it. I found myself hoping the author would keep up the break-neck pace until the end, like a kid on a carnival ride not wanting it to ever stop. He didn't disappoint. We occasionally leap into the past, to a quiet interplay between Martin and a police psychiatrist, and the subtle mind games each play against the other, but we're in these moments only long enough to catch our breath, when the ride starts up again.
Is this a horror novel? Well, sort of. I'd be more likely to classify it as an action/mystery story. Take the fun of a Grafton, the action and violence of Block, a likeable main character as you might find in a Hillerman novel, put them together with the voice and style of one of the best new writers out there today, and you've got an eclectic, fast-paced, sometimes-nasty but always-fun read.
Rating: 
Summary: If You Dislike Private Detectives...
Review: If wise guy, smart mouthed private detectives get on your nerves, if you are revolted by the possibility of having to read one more of Parker's Spencer novels, then this recent tidbit from Brian Hopkins might be just what you need. The investigator in question is Martin Zolotow. Retired from the police due to the excessive death rate that seems to follow him around, Zolotow now alternates between working for hire and rescuing young women from lives of sin on the street. He perceives of himself as a white knight, defending the innocent while quoting Rosetti. The rest of the world, however, seems to disagree with him. In this tale Zolotow is literally kidnapped into helping rescue the daughter of Tobias Weatherford Washington, an Oklahoman crime boss. She has been kidnapped by another equally unpleasant Oklahoman, James McDevitt, who mixes the manufacture and sale of designer drugs with genetic experiments that turn humans into vampires. McDevitt has discovered that young black women are the perfect vampire snack, so Rayleen Washington is at considerable risk. Martin quickly discovers that his work is cut out for him. He finds Rayleen, but is captured himself, and eventually winds up one of the prey in a vampiric cattle drive. What makes "The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club" remarkable it the amount of gratuitous and headlong violence it contains. Almost all of it is aimed at Zolotow. By page 20 he has already received two vicious beatings, and the bloodshed continues through the remaining 152. If you carefully tally up the injuries Martin receives in the 48 hour course of the book, one can only conclude that he has special powers of his own. Unfortunately none of those talents include knowing when to step out of the line of fire. Zolotow likes to irritate his opponents, and often gets what he deserves. I don't want to give the impression this is a badly written book. I'm inclined to think of it as a sort of noir bodice ripper for the macho set. There's lots of rescuing damsels, lots of attacking the bad guys, and not a whole lot of plot to confuse things. In a short novel with this much action it would be too much to expect fine characterization. Instead, Hopkins relies on archetypes to populate his tale (the huge fat bad guy, the prostitute with the heart of gold, etc.). Even Zolotow does a fair amount of posturing in a set of short flashbacks that are intended to help us understand him. It took me a bit to adjust, but in the long run I found the book enjoyable, if somewhat hard to believe.
Rating: 
Summary: Oklahoma will never be the same again!
Review: Martin Zolotow has seen his share of weirdness: wereleopardsand vampires and assorted ghouls. But you'll never believe whatBeaver, Oklahoma has in store for him . . .
Rating:
Summary: An excellent debut novel!
Review: Take a sarcastic private detective, add in rednecks from Oklahoma, genetically engineered vampires and enough action for three John Woo movies and you've got a killer debut novel. Hopkins delivers and he's got a bright future ahead of him. Get in on the ground floor and hang on for a wild and fun ride.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible Title But A Great Read
Review: There is a long standing tradition joining Detective stories with the supernatural or involving a science fiction twist. Clive Barker, Phillip K. Dick and Arthur Conan Doyle have dipped their literary toes into this particular pool with fantastic results. Brian Hopkins has added another quality, fast paced volume to the sub-genre with The Licking Valley Coon Hunter's Club.The hero, Martin Zolotow, joins his predecessors with a few interesting twists of his own. He suffers from a unique malady that can cause bouts of memory loss. It's not the focal point of the story, as is Leonard's little memory quirk in Momento, but it does provide an interesting trait to the character. This little complication explains how his mind is able to make some bizarre connections between pieces of evidence and gives him an excuse to pepper in bits of obscure literary references, poetry and Shakespeare. (Zolotowmemorized bits of prose to train his recollection as a child). Unfortunately, this same interesting quirk also serves the authors inclusion of several distracting flashbacks of the hero in therapy with the one woman that he seems unattracted to. While these vignettes from his recent past are interesting and do add quite a lot to Zolotow's depth of character, the structure removes the reader from the action and breaks the pace of the story. I wouldn't want to see them removed so much as condensed and possibly included as a prologue or serving as the opening chapter. This however, is the one minor misstep in an otherwise cracking good novel. The pace is incredibly fast and the action virtually nonstop. The villains are properly menacing and sinister with loads of interesting little eccentricities of their own. Not only that, but there were plenty of them. Every character, save our hero, a misplaced grad-student and a group of kidnapped prostitutes, wears a figurative black hat. Zolotow was really up against the wall in this one. Licking Valley is a nice, quick read that will leave you wanting more. Hopefully the subtitle- "A Martin Zolotow Mystery" is indicative of the fact that there will be more adventures of my favorite, brain damaged detective forthcoming.
Rating:
Summary: Move Over McGee, Zolo's Aiming at Those Windmills Now!
Review: This first novel for Brian A. Hopkins features one Martin Zolotow, a rough hewn, ex-cop with a soft spot for well-turned ankles and a hard fist for nasty, bad guys. He's puppy-dog lovable and wild-animal rugged all in the same breath. The story opens with Zolotow ("Zolo" to his friends and the ladies) painfully parting with his current lover, a young hooker he's taken off the streets, loved, and is putting on a plane that will send her back to an innocent life with her family. What he finds out immediately after her departure is that some rather creepy bad-guys are waiting to abscond him and whisk him away to... Oklahoma City! Once in the Sooner state, Zolo's taken to a secluded stronghold somewhere in the OK panhandle, but not before he's recruited to rescue the daughter of a major crime figure. His incentive (besides just staying alive) is the young woman he had just put on the plane. He fails; she dies. Put through his paces in this wild, action-packed adventure, Zolo battles both the members of the Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club (they're originally from Ohio and not native Oklahoman bad blood) and his own muddled memory, an affliction that is at once his Achilles heel and a strange endearing quality. He's beaten with a ball bat, dragged through cow manure, chased, and shot at, but never totally thwarted because the poetry-spouting detective's acerbic wit and undaunting sense of what's right makes him too driven to stay down. Oh, and also some very lovely women come to his aid. Mix in a snarling dog, a gaunt bad-guy in a wheelchair, some women who can handle both being sexy in bubble baths and in employing martial arts kicks--oh, and vampires!--and the action is non-stop! Hopkins takes the reader on a wild romp with sure ease in his knowledge of weapons, chemistry, and women. Yet it's Zolo's revealing himself as kindhearted as Joe R. Lansdale's Hap Collins (and just as unlucky!) and as blindly chivalrous as John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee that make Zolo a whole new breed of hero, the kind who would attack a windmill on a seatless motorcycle in a tiger print bikini brief to save a lady! But that's another adventure all together.
|
