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Nowak Brothers #3
Support Your Local Monster Hunter
Support your local monster hunter! And specifically, support Szandor Nowak, because he needs help. After an unfortunate and unwilling break from monster hunting due to debt and poor health, Szandor is getting back into the business, riding along with older, more experienced hunters to get a feel for the work. This should have been easy and boring, but instead it all goes wrong. In a dark alley, Szandor finds a man hidden in trash. When he tries to help, the man's head explodes bloodily and spontaneously... and all over Szandor. This seems a horrible but otherwise anomalous encounter, so with no leads or reason for the man's death, Szandor continues on with his reckless life and hunter ride alongs. But when he encounters a second man whose head also explodes, Szandor's life starts to fall apart - his relationships, his friends, even his chance at hunting again. He even finds his brother Mikkel turning his back on him. But in the blackest night of loneliness, he finds a new hope - a mentor and a friend. But with this comes a hidden secret of Avalon's darkest places, a hidden underbelly he didn't know about. Things are going to hit the fan in Szandor's life - an army of monsters, a police homicide investigation, and his back against the wall. When all doors are closed, when he finds himself all alone, can Szandor fight a war he knows he can't win?
270 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 2, 2016
7 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Liggio
29 books76 followersDennis Liggio is the author of sixteen books, including I KILL MONSTERS, the DAMNED LIES series, THE LOST AND THE DAMNED, and the books set in the city of New Avalon. He is a veteran of the game industry, enjoys long walks on the beach while thumbing through tomes of unspeakable evil, and rumor has it that if you say his name three times in front of a mirror at midnight he will appear and give you Hostess Fruit Pies. He writes primarily in the genres of geeky absurdist humor, horror, and urban fantasy. He lives in Pflugerville, Texas with his amazing wife, awesome daughter, and four cats that act like wieners..
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 17, 2022
Another great addition to the series
Support Your Local Monster Hunter
Dennis Liggio
A great character driven book with terrific action, monsters, situations, dialogue, and a great dog! A terrific book! Loving this series!
Support Your Local Monster Hunter
Dennis Liggio
A great character driven book with terrific action, monsters, situations, dialogue, and a great dog! A terrific book! Loving this series!
June 7, 2021
After Jabberwock Jack, which took a detour into the mind of older and slightly more restrained brother Mikkel Nowak, we’re back in the OG Szandor Nowak’s shoes. Szandor is ever the prickly pear, unable to restrain his will to rebel against everything and everything like an angsty teenager (he’s only 21 in the books), but now he somehow has a girlfriend who doesn’t even believe that the monsters he hunts are real.
Szandor has a pretty bleak outlook on life, and that makes sense. For one, his father was some kind of deadbeat, his mother was killed by a vampire, and his whole shtick is getting revenge against monsters for the rest of his life. He claims that his motivations are pure, ‘saving the world,’ or some such, but it’s somewhat clear that the guy is a self-destruction machine. Smokes, booze, bad decisions, let’s go. He’s a walking punk rock cliché – he even gets asked to join a punk rock band at one point. And shows up at the local suicide bridge when his girlfriend, brother, and a few others stage an intervention to try to get him to stop monster hunting.
I’ll be frank: you have got to leave your disbelief at the door (do I really need to put that in a review about a book about monster hunters?) This is a B-action movie made lit-ra-chure, and most everything seems to be a carica..chure. Perhaps the extremely methodical thought processes are a glimpse into the mind of the author, but the links in the chain of the reasoning feels mathematical at times. ‘X is Y followed by Z because this and then this is the next logical step and then here is the rational next step,’ kind of thing. But it’s endearing in a strange way. One character in particular, framed as a total monster hunting bad-ass yet who demonstrates an unlikely heart of gold and strangely deficient sense of discretion (and a massive Great Dane helper, to boot), had words coming out of his mouth that seemed quite out of place and elicited a bit of a chuckle from me.
In any event, the action is where these novels shine. There is a level of desperation that Szandor is living with that bleeds into the action scenes. We have strange new enemies, as well as familiar ones. The new weird ones are extremely… weird, and Szandor ends up in trouble with the law, which was a nice touch. I mean, for two books these Nowak guys were carrying around a lead pipe and a katana and messing shit up on the streets of what feels like a pretty big city. To have not run into the cops at all would have been weird, and in this book you get a taste of the thin blue line. But the coppahs ain’t got nothin’ on Szandor.
This is a book about monsters, but it’s also about the real monster of life: loneliness. After the massive shit storm of the past fifteen or so months, and having just gotten microchipped with Bill Gates' 5G technology this past week (read: a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine), there was some real poignancy in reading about a guy who basically cuts himself off from all of his contacts (to be fair, many of his friends and family were being implausibly large dickheads – I have thankfully never been personally involved with people as ridiculously cold as some of these who supposedly love our protag). Isolation sucks the big one, but not as much as the super cool vampire variants who just got tossed in there out of the blue in a big surprise reveal.
Whoops, sorry for spoiling that, but did you see what I did there?
In reality, nothing is spoiled. Like I said, there are ‘new’ familiar monsters in this story, ones whom I’m quite interested in reading about in the next books in the series. Szandor has learned his bit about the value of companionship and togetherness, which I think has been a largely global lesson for those of us finally able to see the light at the end of the tunnel of lockdowns and more Zoom meetings than is reasonable for suckers for physical presence like we human beings. To boot: Szandor develops the stones to drop the ‘girlfriend’ whose theory of his mental state must have included literal psychosis.
Like I said, leave that disbelief at the door.
Szandor has a pretty bleak outlook on life, and that makes sense. For one, his father was some kind of deadbeat, his mother was killed by a vampire, and his whole shtick is getting revenge against monsters for the rest of his life. He claims that his motivations are pure, ‘saving the world,’ or some such, but it’s somewhat clear that the guy is a self-destruction machine. Smokes, booze, bad decisions, let’s go. He’s a walking punk rock cliché – he even gets asked to join a punk rock band at one point. And shows up at the local suicide bridge when his girlfriend, brother, and a few others stage an intervention to try to get him to stop monster hunting.
I’ll be frank: you have got to leave your disbelief at the door (do I really need to put that in a review about a book about monster hunters?) This is a B-action movie made lit-ra-chure, and most everything seems to be a carica..chure. Perhaps the extremely methodical thought processes are a glimpse into the mind of the author, but the links in the chain of the reasoning feels mathematical at times. ‘X is Y followed by Z because this and then this is the next logical step and then here is the rational next step,’ kind of thing. But it’s endearing in a strange way. One character in particular, framed as a total monster hunting bad-ass yet who demonstrates an unlikely heart of gold and strangely deficient sense of discretion (and a massive Great Dane helper, to boot), had words coming out of his mouth that seemed quite out of place and elicited a bit of a chuckle from me.
In any event, the action is where these novels shine. There is a level of desperation that Szandor is living with that bleeds into the action scenes. We have strange new enemies, as well as familiar ones. The new weird ones are extremely… weird, and Szandor ends up in trouble with the law, which was a nice touch. I mean, for two books these Nowak guys were carrying around a lead pipe and a katana and messing shit up on the streets of what feels like a pretty big city. To have not run into the cops at all would have been weird, and in this book you get a taste of the thin blue line. But the coppahs ain’t got nothin’ on Szandor.
This is a book about monsters, but it’s also about the real monster of life: loneliness. After the massive shit storm of the past fifteen or so months, and having just gotten microchipped with Bill Gates' 5G technology this past week (read: a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine), there was some real poignancy in reading about a guy who basically cuts himself off from all of his contacts (to be fair, many of his friends and family were being implausibly large dickheads – I have thankfully never been personally involved with people as ridiculously cold as some of these who supposedly love our protag). Isolation sucks the big one, but not as much as the super cool vampire variants who just got tossed in there out of the blue in a big surprise reveal.
Whoops, sorry for spoiling that, but did you see what I did there?
In reality, nothing is spoiled. Like I said, there are ‘new’ familiar monsters in this story, ones whom I’m quite interested in reading about in the next books in the series. Szandor has learned his bit about the value of companionship and togetherness, which I think has been a largely global lesson for those of us finally able to see the light at the end of the tunnel of lockdowns and more Zoom meetings than is reasonable for suckers for physical presence like we human beings. To boot: Szandor develops the stones to drop the ‘girlfriend’ whose theory of his mental state must have included literal psychosis.
Like I said, leave that disbelief at the door.
May 5, 2021
I live to Nowak's!
Dennis Liggio has written my new favorite series. I am so glad they are available on Kindle Unlimited.
These guys are like the Winchesters but with real lives. Fighting and killing the unique monsters in their weird city.
I'm going to keep reading them. If you haven't started you should.
Dennis Liggio has written my new favorite series. I am so glad they are available on Kindle Unlimited.
These guys are like the Winchesters but with real lives. Fighting and killing the unique monsters in their weird city.
I'm going to keep reading them. If you haven't started you should.
October 12, 2022
This is probably one of the most entertaining series I have read in a long time. By entertaining I mean it's not just for scares, or drama, or thrills, or laughs, but for ALL of those things rolled into one. And, with Szandor's life being so dysfunctional, it makes me feel great that I'm not as f##ed up as I thought I was. Looking forward to what Mikkel gets up to in Book 4.
January 30, 2019
I think I know who Kolchak is supposed to be.
February 1, 2017
Very good read...little long on plot
Will read more on this series ..I don't like being forced to write more words..I hate this bossy shut nuff said
Will read more on this series ..I don't like being forced to write more words..I hate this bossy shut nuff said
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews