Tequila Mockingbird

Rating:
Summary: Painfully pun abound
Review: "Never heard of Nick Pollotta? Join the club. Specializing in SF, mystery and humor - and with sixty published titles under his belt, Nick Pollotta has been plugging away just under the mainstream radar for the last fifteen years, earning a living as a writer and having fun doing it.
Tequila Mockingbird is his first collection of humorous (and often painfully punny) short stories. Pollotta's style is a sort of Monty-Python-meets-Raymond-Chandler pastiche. He writes with teenage enthusiasm - there's definitely no tortured, angst-filled artiste behind the gleeful storytelling. This guy obviously loves what he does!
The collection contains eleven stories, all of them bridged with an increasingly preposterous (but informative) "radio interview" with the author.
Tequila Mockingbird is a pie in the face of all the self-important genre fiction that takes itself too seriously. This collection is a delight, playfully lampooning everything we've come to love - and hate - about genre fiction. Tequila Mockingbird probably won't win any awards - but it will give you a few belly laughs!

Rating:
Summary: One of Nick's best efforts.
Review: Nick has long been known for his well written and funny novels but this collection of short Mystery and SF stories is way over the top. Loving and spot-on sendups ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to Robert B. Parker, a shaggy dog story of a rap star and even a new take on his own Bureau 13 books, this is not to be missed.

Rating:
Summary: Highly entertaining
Review: Nick Pollotta has vampires on the brain and that's a pretty good thing since he writes the Bureau 13 novels and has a couple of stories about them in this volume. These are not your ordinary vampire stories; they are laced with a heavy dose of humor and topped with a pun or two.

"Upgrading" is a Bureau 13 story about one of their members getting his talents upgraded so he can become better at his job. "The Incredibly Civil War" is a tale that reads like an old Harold Lloyd or Three Stooges movie. "The Collar" features a contract killer who finds another calling after meeting a demon. "Raw Terra" is a science fiction tale of cleaning up Titan and a new look at terraforming. "A Matter of Taste" and "The Really Final Solution" are detective tales with Holmes and Watson appearing in the latter. "Power to the People" is another futuristic tale of a war ravaged Earth and one mans attempt to help out.

Pollotta has written an entertaining collection of tales that will bring a chuckle and a grin to show his talent and versatility.