Lethal Injection

by Jim Nisbet

Overlook is remedying that with this paperback- the first of nine publications that will make up a Nisbet revolution. It's about as noir as you can get. In a bleak Texas prison Royce, an alcoholic doctor administers Bobby Mencken's last "high," convinced that the convicted killer was innocent. When Royce's marriage crumbles he takes off for Dallas to search for the real killer. Of Nisbet, Germany's Die Welt wrote, "Neither Norman Mailer nor Truman Capote has in their writing been able to produce such an intensity as Nisbet has achieved." With sharp humor and a poet's ear for language, Nisbet's world may be bleak, but it is frighteningly real. Overlook is proud to bring him to a new generation of readers.

Genres: Crime, Noir, Fiction, Mystery, Novels

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1987

About the author

San Francisco writer Jim Nisbet has published eleven novels, including the acclaimed Lethal Injection. He has also published five volumes of poetry. His novel, Dark Companion, was shorted-listed for the 2006 Hammett Prize. Various of his works have been translated into French, German, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Russian and Romanian.

Aside from reading and performing his own work for some forty-five years, Nisbet has written and seen produced a modest handful of one-act plays and monologues, including Valentine, Note from Earth, WonderEndz™ SmackVision™ and Alas, Poor Yorick, and himself directed the original productions of most of these works.

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A doctor tasked with the execution of a condemned prisoner becomes convinced that the man he just put to death was innocent. He heads off to Dallas to prove his theory, and becomes entangled with two unsavory characters, one of whom may have committed the crime that earned the prisoner his death sentence.

This is a dark ride into a dismal world of crime, alcohol, and drugs. Nisbet, a new author for me, conjures up some snazzy writing, with a real James M. Cain feel of hopeless people limping toward disaster. I loved this bit:

The material slid off her shoulders as she passed and left behind a glimpse of her nakedness as she entered the bedroom. Royce's eyes tore at this vision like caged ferrets. He sniffed the air as she passed.

Yowl!

This short read can easily be gobbled up in one sitting. I can only describe it as unpleasant, yet completely mesmerizing. Thanks to Still for suggesting Nisbet, and this book. It's our September read in the Pulp Fiction group - https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/..., if you'd like to join us.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

[9/10]

He’d been born black, athletic, pansexual, half-crazy, good-looking, loyal, irrational, fun-loving, smart, eager, terrified and broke.
Would even death end his “distress”?

Bobby Mencken is about to take his last walk from his cell on Death Row in the Huntsville prison, Texas. The state has found him guilty of murder most foul and is hell bent on administering him a lethal injection despite the case being build mostly on circumstantial evidence. But Bobby is not one to go meekly into the long goodbye! He’ll take some of his abusers down with him.

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Reading the opening chapter of this, my first crime novel from Jim Nisbet, is like a swift kick to the gut: fast and mean and uncompromisingly brutal. None of the whimsical and long-winded paranormal atmosphere from an earlier foray into “The Green Mile” by Steven King, even as the two stories share a clear condemnation of death penalty.
Nisbet is not fooling around, and the next chapters, describing in detail the procedure for killing a man with a cocktail of deadly chemicals while the ‘honest’ citizens and the press watch with avid eyes from behind the safety of a picture window, keeps the reader on the edge of his seat and guessing where this story is going, when the main actor is just about to expire?

But why risk his life, as Royce was clearly doing, for a dead man he’d never known? To justify a squandered career, a medical practice so decrepit that he’d take on the odious millstone of being medical practitioner to several thousand miserable, desperate men in the Huntsville prison? [...] because he couldn’t control his own drinking or his wife’s excessive and compulsive expenditures?

Franklin Royce is the prison’s attending physician, tasked with administering the lethal injection to Mencken. Impressed by the inmate’s fortitude and fighting spirit, Royce sets out to find out the truth about Bobby Mencken’s crime and about the reason he took the blame for a crime he claims he didn’t commit. All Royce has to go on is the name of a woman that is Mencken’s last word in this sorry world.

After so many years he wondered if life held anything more profound than monthly payments, overdrafts at the bank, unfair speeding tickets, a credit card scissored in two on a silver tray in a very nice restaurant, a life whose pecuniary rhythms sailed from troughs of embarrassment to peaks of anxiety and back again with no respite.

After a couple of chapters setting out the case of the new lead character, describing his own dead end suburban lifestyle and justifying the radical change of heart Franklin experienced by the side of the dying Mencken, the story moves to a decrepit Dallas suburb where apparently the only woman to have visited Mencken in prison currently lives.

“They didn’t even run a paraffin test on him, to see if he’d fired the goddamn gun. Hell, the goddamn test was invented in Mexico, by a Mexican cop. If the Mexicans can invent the goddamn test, you’d think these cracker Dallas cops could use it. But no. Hell, no. They had their desperate Negro junkie and the murder weapon.”

Franklin Royce has his first impressions about the innocence of Mencken strengthened very soon after meeting a woman that for me is the essence of the ‘femme fatale’ template of the noir genre: oozing sex-appeal and mystery, volatile and vulnerable, deadly attractive for the beaten down doctor. Franklin willingly steps into her spider’s web, even as he realizes he is out of his depth in this rundown tenement of drug dealers and house breakers.

Nisbet continues to impress me with the way he shifts focus on the story, while remaining faithful to the opening gambit of finding out the story behind Bobby Mencken’s execution. His prose is pared down to a bare minimum, but Nesbit somehow makes every word, every scene count, and even has space for introspection and for some lyrical turns of phrase. He is so deft at creating mood, at cranking up the tension and at keeping the reader unsettled that you don’t realize you’ve been gobbling up the story in basically one sitting.

For what it’s worth, and based only on this first read, I believe Jim Nisbet is one of the best authors who absorbed the essence of the classic writers of noir like Jim Thompson, David Goodis or Horace McCoy and brought it up to speed for a more contemporary setting. The plight of the black community, economically pushed into the gutter and racially targeted by the police is a subject that has become even more painfully relevant today than it was at the time of publication [1987].
The finale, which I am not going to spoil for you, reminded me in particular of McCoy, and about the impossibility of evading one’s fate, something already announced by Bobby Mencken with his remarks on life as a game of poker.

Which is the bigger waste? a man born with a chance who blows it, or a man born with no chance who fights it? They’re both losers in the end, aren’t they?

Needless to say, I am now determined to read more from Nisbet, to confirm the good impression left by “Lethal Injection”

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Nesbit's "Lethal Injection" is an amazing tour de force of a crime thriller. His writing is rich and layered. The story moves along at breackneck speed.

It is a book that is probably unlike anything else you have ever read, beginning with an in-depth scene taking the reader step by step through the final hours of Mencken as his sentence is finally carried out. They are a frenzied, wild last few hours filled with irony, violence, and characters.
But the focus is not really on Mencken. It's Royce, Dr Royce, Dr. Death, who is the star of this show as the doctor wonders if Mencken really did it and delves into his life in an attempt to figure out the truth. This is the doctor's stunning descent into a world he could barely have imagined, a glimpse perhaps into the gates of hell.

Whose life though is crazier Mencken's or Royce's? Royce is stuck in a bitter, hateful marriage where they have to go shopping for new dishes every few months. His career is wasting away and he took on a contract no one else wanted. Is he a righteous man searching for justice or, in the end, is he just another crazed addict trapped in a world of lust and greed?

Life is a game of poker and you gotta deal with the hand you're dealt.

[Tara Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is noir at its finest. A powerful, riveting nightmare right from the start. I was very impressed with the first half and not so much with the downward spiral of our protagonist.

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second time reading this amazing if disturbing, short noir novel.

He recalled an old Huntsville con who used to quote a ditty as Royce dressed the man's persistently gangrenous leg:

"Life is a game of poker.
Happiness is in the pot.
You're dealt five cards from the cradle.
And you play them whether you like it or not"

...Three days later the man died anyway. Just before he lost consciousness for the last time, he half opened his eyes and recognized Royce at the foot of his bed. He winked and said, "Life is just a game of poker..."

"Einstein said something about God and dice," the old man said to him once. "But God doesn't use dice. He runs a poker game. There's a difference."

God my ass, Royce thought.

Royce Franklin is a doctor with a small practice on the ropes back in Giddings, Texas (about 55 miles east of Austin). To augment his income, Royce has taken a part time job in the prison at Huntsville, administering to the medical needs of inmates -mostly victims of beatings or worse- rapes. For the first time Royce's services have been retained for a special job -he's being given $400 to administer a hot-shot to a convict condemned to be executed for the robbery and murder of a convenience store clerk - a woman who left behind three children.

The condemned man - Bobby Mencken - moments before being taken out of his cell to be executed, in response to a racist taunt from the sadistic prison guard "Pitbull" Peters, leaps ten feet toward "Pitbull", allowing himself an extra two feet of chain to wrap around "Pitbulls" short neck, which Mencken snaps like a Number 2 pencil.

By the time the guards and the warden are finished beating the bejesus out of Mencken in retaliation, the execution has been delayed 45 minutes and the doctor in the execution room is shocked to see the condition the prisoner is in: the loss of blood and numerous lacerations Mencken has suffered.

To ease Mencken's agony, Doctor Royce Franklin administers a strong dose of morphine to the condemned man prior to shooting him up with a cocktail of toxins intended to end his life.

During the execution the situation goes haywire . Mencken fights the drugs off, struggles with his restraints and proclaims his innocence. He manages to bench press the two guards holding him down, lifting each up by their groin. The doctor has to administer yet another hot shot which slowly brings Bobby Mencken down. As the doctor bends his head over on Mencken's chest to check his heartbeat, Mencken whispers something to Royce Franklin. The doctor moves his head over to hear Mencken's whispered plea and when he does, Bobby Mencken's last act on earth is to plant a kiss on Doctor Royce Franklin's mouth.

We're with Royce Franklin as he drives back to his home, stopping halfway to have a couple of drinks at an all night bar just off the state highway. Royce can't get over the execution of Bobby Mencken. He has a little too much to drink and doesn't get home until around four in the morning only to be confronted by his out-of-her-mind wife.

Which is a bigger waste? A man born with a chance who blows it, or a man born with no chance who fights it? They're both losers, aren't they?

Yes and no, he decided. Bobby Mencken's death had shown him a true wrong dealt a man whose life, on its own level, had probably been no more or less screwed up than Royce's. Had such an injustice been perpetrated on Royce instead of Mencken, Royce would have fought tooth and nail for what he perceived as his God-given right to be allowed to continue his trivial suffering, rather than go through the twisted fate of being condemned to die for an act he hadn't committed.

Wouldn't he?

God-given indeed. Who was he kidding? You dance with your fate, or your fate dances with you. And nobody knows his fate until he's looking at it, until it's too late, until it practically over.

God my ass...

The next morning he wakens with a hangover all alone in an empty house.
Fuck it, he thinks.
He decides to drive to Dallas with some kind of notion to prove the innocence of Bobby Mencken.

In East Dallas, he locates Bobby Mencken's girlfriend Colleen and one of Bobby's long-time buddies Fast Eddie.
And nothing works out as originally intended.

Hair-raiser of a thriller. Edge-of-your-seat reading.
Five Stars per usual. One of Nisbet's best.

Justice, even retroactive justice, seemed a clear alternative to that final outrage. And in the act of securing justice for Bobby Mencken, Royce thought he could see a way to secure a modicum of dignity for his own miserable life - justification, even.

But there was more to it than that. More than justice. More than justification. More than dignity. Nothing less than, perhaps, revenge.

Revenge for whom? For Mencken?

Mencken didn't need any avenging, he was beyond it. Technically, morally, that's what Royce was up to. But, as the say in Pravda sometimes, Royce was technically and morally worn out. What he wanted was revenge for the miserable, vacuous betrayal his own life had become.

Go home? No. No more home.

[James Thane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a book to read when you're feeling depressed. As a practical matter, there are no redeeming characters in it and nothing remotely happy about it. That said, it's a very intriguing book and, for the most part is very well written. James Ellroy wrote the blurb for the cover, which should tell you something, one way or the other.

Franklin Royce is a hard-drinking doctor with a seriously disturbed wife, who's already on the downward spiral when he agrees to become the doctor at the notorious Hunstville prison. For an extra four hundred dollars, he agrees to preside over the execution of Bobby Mencken who's been convicted of killing a clerk in a convenience store robbery.

Royce becomes convinced that Mencken is actually innocent and sets out on a mission to find the real killer. The quest takes him into the proverbial Heart of Darkness, fueled by drugs, booze, kinky sex and random acts of violence.

There really isn't much of a plot to this book, and what plot there is strains credulity. It also ends very abruptly, but this is really a character study--principally of Franklin Royce, but also of Bobby Mencken and of two other characters with whom Royce becomes entangled. And watching them is like seeing a bloody train wreck in slow motion--it's horrifying but you cannot look away. This isn't a book for everyone, but noir fans should find more than enough in it to make it worth the price of admission.

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a modern noir book that is actually noir. Too often, the word is used to mean so many different things or there's just a "I know it when I see" attitude toward noir. I'm not going to get into it, but noir, hard-boiled, and pulp are three different things that aren't even in the same categories (one is thematic, one is a genre, and one is the execution, which is why you can have any combination of the three: hard-boiled noir, pulp noir, etc. Okay, I did get into it.)

The tragedy of this noir comes out of the optimism and search for balance of the main character. The hero's life is a wreck and when he's convinced of an injustice, he feels the need to investigate, even if it's just to run away. The downward spiral that follows is never predictable, always real, and completely dark.

I can see how this book would not be for everyone, but it's right in my wheelhouse.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

We can be thankful that Nisbet went through his detective novel crisis in A Moment of Doubt because with his fourth novel he quit chafing against the Hammett/Chandler genre conventions and instead freed his talent to write a noir masterpiece. How could this book have been out of print for so long? Apparently the deepest, darkest, nihilistic despair didn't sell. But for this book to go out of print while Goodis and Thompson were being revived is beyond comprehension. Nisbet writes circles around them. The first three chapters leading up to Mencken's execution are just pummeling. And then begins the slippery slope journey of Franklin Royce, prison doctor, seeking the answer to the question of Mencken's innocence and hoping - or perhaps not - to also fill the deep hole within:

Which is the bigger waste? A man born with a chance who blows it, or a man born with no chance who fights it? They're both losers in the end, aren't they?

Royce seeks out Mencken's girlfriend Colleen, hoping to find out why Mencken took the rap for a murder he didn't commit. He finds her. And what else he finds you'll have to discover yourself when you read the book. Just don't expect redemption.

[WJEP · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good ending. Everything else was either absurd or abominable.

[Jonathan Briggs · Rating 2 out of 5]

At 25 minutes after midnight on Huntsville death row in Texas, the executinest state in the nation ("We're No. 1! We're No. 1!"), when Bobby Mencken still hasn't shown up to meet his destiny at the tip of a needle, prison doctor Franklin Royce suspects something has gone awry.

Shortly before his scheduled execution, Mencken, though still chained in his cell and tranqed to the gills, has dropped a body, one last-minute addition to his life's tally of crimes.

The warden sends word to Royce to sit tight, "they'll be right along." The guards need a couple extra minutes to beat Mencken senseless in memoriam to the comrade just murdered by the convict.

Appalled by the violence and feeling something like admiration for Mencken's display of defiance and stoicism in the face of death, Royce offers the convict a final fix of covert morphine before the lethal shot, and the men, each condemned in his own way, bond over junk and fatalistic irony.

In an "any last words?" speech that seems to drag on until sunrise, Mencken protests that he's being punished for the wrong sin, as he's been all his poor, mistreated life. For some reason, this makes a difference to Royce. Mencken gives him the literal kiss-off, and Royce drunkenly drives home, his bean-counting conscience nagging him that he may have helped kill a murderer for the wrong murder.

Amid the incarcerated punks and pedophiles, Mencken was regarded as something of a saint, and, like, they would know, right? Assuming Mencken's innocence, Royce sets out to determine what social factors conspired to lay his lamb low.

To staunch the flow from his bleeding heart, Royce visits the hood and proves himself every bit the guilty white liberal jerkoff, proffering dollar bills and calling people "son." He hooks up with Mencken's crew, and after Eddie Lamark -- "a by God GEN-u-whine REP-tile!" -- burns two fang marks into Royce's neck with a cigarette, they all sit down over coffee, and Royce asks if he can sleep over. It's all real social. Despite a longtime smack habit, Mencken's ex-old lady, Colleen Valdez, maintains a healthy set of boozums and buttocks to endlessly fascinate Royce.

Royce's Homeric "odyssey to vindicate Bobby Mencken's wrongful death" is hijacked and turned into a Dante-esqe descent into Dallas' diseased bowels. (I hope I got my literary references correct. I'm not as well-versed in the classics as the novel's ne'er-do-wells.)

Noir is often characterized by its minimalism. Jim Nisbet goes full-on maximal. Where crime fiction masters Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake pruned their prose to the lean-n-mean essential, Nisbet erupts in explosions of erudite overkill, resulting in similes (so integral a part of the noir) that are amusingly overwrought: "His Adam's apple bobbed up and down his throat like a nervous commodities broker trading in mucus and obsequies." "Dark hair sparsely swept along her bare arms like gently curved, fragile filaments aligned by secret magnetic fields." Nisbet shamelessly indulges his pretensions by deploying adjectives such as "thanatophagous," though he's not so shameless as to deny his readers the accommodation of a definition a second later: "death-eating."

While the average genre thug might display an abundance of quirky, colorful savagery to disguise a dearth in intellect, Nisbet's characters carry on like doctoral dissertation defenders. The dialog is overly theatrical, stridently pitched and projected to the rafters. Nisbet's drug addicts and convicts are improbably eloquent and well-read, discussing the aesthetics of Jean Genet and keeping their junk works atop copies of "War and Peace." In the much less stimulating straight world, Nisbet's attempts to transcribe a Texas twang carry the sour tang of San Francisco smug.

To the extent that it's known at all, "Lethal Injection" has a reputation as the deepest, darkest, bleakest, blackest noir novel. There's a certain rotgut buzz to be had in its belabored attempts to be unpleasant, but the idea that anyone could take this fractured fairy tale seriously long enough to be disturbed by it is beyond me.

Barry Gifford and a couple of the other neo-noirists have tried to build a cult following around Nisbet (I think Ken Bruen blurbs just to see his name on every other book cover), but if readers are looking to devote themselves to underread authors in the genre, Jack O'Connell or James Sallis might be more deserving candidates. Reserve "Lethal Injection" for your favorite death penalty opponent or ACLU member.

[Brian Fagan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Isn't it fascinating to watch how "normal" folks act when they suddenly become complicit in a crime? I think of the humorous scenes in the film "Amercian Graffiti" in which Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is forcibly adopted by The Pharaohs, a bunch of hoodlums, and must help them rob a friend's store and wreck a police car. In Jim Nisbet's 1987 noir thriller "Lethal Injection", a down-on-his-luck physician who supervises prison executions for the supplemental income becomes convinced by the eleventh hour innocent plea of his latest death penalty recipient. His investigation takes him to a seedy Dallas neighborhood and he joins up with two druggies who take him out for an armed robbery.

Nisbet has some good strengths as a writer. I like that he doesn't hesitate to clearly lay out motivations for his characters. That seems to have passed out of vogue, and the result can be frustrating. And he likes to let time slow down in tense confrontations. In one example early in the book, we sense that a dangerous man's temper is escalating. Just as we reach the apparent climax of the scene, Nisbet pulls away to a side story. Then we are suddenly back at the height of tension in the scene again. Very well done.

As I moved along in the story, I started to get echoes of Larry McMurtry in Nisbet's prose. McMurtry doesn't write noir or crime novels, but there was something here that had that ring to it. I had to chuckle then when Nisbet paid McMurtry a more obvious tip of the hat by mentioning two of his books-turned-movies on a character's shelf.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lethal Injection has been in my TBR pile for 30+ years, as have been many of the original Black Lizard titles. This is a great one, which the passing of time—before I got around to reading it—hasn’t diminished. It’s about a doctor, who oversees executions on Texas’ Death Row, and instinct has told him that a particular prisoner whose death he’s overseeing is actually innocent of the crime for which he’s being put to death.

Early the morning following the execution, his wife decides to leave him for good. You get a little background on how bad the marriage is and the doctor then decides to follow his instincts and track down the real killer, suspecting the executed killer, Bobby Mencken, was taking the fall for somebody else.

He finally catches up with Bobby’s best friend and girlfriend and suspects that he took the fall for one of them. Rather than telling them that he was the administrating doctor at the execution, he tells them that he was actually serving time with Bobby for illegally writing scrips for junkies rather than the executioner—now trying to correct a mistake.

Like the book, The Vanishing by Tim Krabbé, this story poses the hypothetical question, “How far would you go find the truth?”

[Pierluigi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una piacevole sorpresa

[Jason McCracken · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first third was violent over-the-top brilliance but then it just falls away as it attempted to become believable... it was a very quick read at least.

[Chelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. I might not have liked this book if it had been longer though as it's very dark and -dark I like, but it's also- extremely depressing. Very realistic, visceral, and did I mention depressing? If you're into that, this is a definite read.

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lethal Injection is a dark story that follows Dr. Royce, a downtrodden soul into an abyss he cannot escape from. His life has been on this path for some time. A marriage gone sour fueled by too much drinking finds Royce, the prison doctor ready to provide the lethal injection to another hardened inmate. Whispered words lead Royce to follow the trail of a killing.

This is a sad, harsh, grim tale of one man who seemingly has been giving himself that one, long, slow lethal injection. This is highly recommended.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lethal Injection is a bleak novel published in 1987 and just released in the U.S. in paperback in 2010. The paperback has blurbs from James Ellroy, Barry Gifford, Ken Bruen, and Scott Phillips--if you like those writers, you will like Jim Nisbet. In this novel, a prison doctor with drinking and marital problems gives the lethal injection to a condemned prisoner and then goes to the man's home to see if he was really innocent of the crime. A dark story but well written.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another reviewer said this is as noir as it gets, and I have to agree. This is dark, dark stuff, but I love noir, and it's always great discovering a new author. A great read, but definitely not for the squeamish or fainthearted.

[Joe Surkiewicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's noir and there's grim, and Lethal Injection definitely leans toward grim. Me, I like my protagonists to have some redeeming values. That's noir to me, a hero with character flaws who rises to the occasion. Old school. Not much of that in Lethal Injection. On the plus side, Nisbet is a good writer, definitely pulls off some memorable phrases, a bit overwrought at times, but he kept me reading. And the book is short, a big plus when none of the characters are likable. One flaw at the end and I can't describe it here without being a complete dick. Or maybe it's me, I just didn't get it. And this one very big positive: Nisbet's descriptions of a heroin high makes me wonder (yet again) about what I've been missing. Might be something to look forward to when I get that incurable cancer diagnosis.

[Mark Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

The prose was pretty windy through the first three chapters and I almost didn’t keep going, but the storytelling got tighter after that, although there continued to be paragraphs that could have been shortened or felt skippable. The characters and context and surprising turns in the story were good, although there were maybe too many of them and they got a bit less believable towards the end although they were never all that believable to begin with. The fancy vocabulary seemed to become a more effective part of the work as the novel went on. The novel is very dark but it didn’t strike deep; it felt a bit like an overly stylized imitation. Still, once it got going, it was an enjoyable and often gripping tale. If it’s not essential noir writing, it’s quite a bit more original than many works in the genre.

[Victor Anda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is noir as fuck, and I mean that as a compliment. I heard about it from Jordan Harper in a podcast interview he did a while back. Nisbet's writing is poetic and pitch black, but he throws in some humor as well. No one is entirely innocent in this book, and if you like walking on the wild side, you'll enjoy this short novel that's long on vengeance, despair, and yearning. Highly recommended.

[Cristian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bellissimo e stupendamente scritto.
Un noir con gli attributi

[Will Granger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dark and well done

[Matt Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

A straight up masterwork in noir. No more description is necessary here.

[Hoff The Librarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opening with a brutal scene preceding a lethal injection, this is one of the more hyper-violent books I've read, evenly balanced with some of the most enjoyably purple stretched out descriptions of sad carnage that I've ever encountered. I've read reviews about the depressive tone of the story, but I would counter this story is all grit, as the powerfully able narrator turns his vicious judgment on the world as he views it. The characters do seem more vicious than the next, but this is part of the book's allure, the harsh truth that nobody is what they seem. This is a powerful work that far more people need to know about.

[James W. Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glance over the reviews at Amazon and see how strongly readers react to this. You'll see adjectives like bleak, grim, tormented, dirty, horrifying, terrifying, gruesome, tough, gritty, ugly.... and so forth. You'll also read that it has a smidgin of (quite black) humor. All true.

It's a landmark noir in the tradition of the darker noir writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis. I loved it. Certainly not for everyone, but if it sounds like it may be for you, check it out, you might just love it, too.

[Massimo Gottifredi · Rating 5 out of 5]

La descrizione dell'esecuzione capitale di Bobby è esemplare. Da sola vale tutto un libro nel complesso magnifico.
Royce voleva restituire giustizia alla società e una nuova vita a se stesso. Ingenuamente e cinicamente allo stesso tempo, ma non senza commettere errori.
Grande libro. Scrittura affilata con i personaggi ottimamente delineati in poche pagine.

[Georgiana Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still waiting for the nausea to wear off. This was one helluva phenomenally-written novel. Not for the faint of heart.

[david abbott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel written in an unexpected way

[Avra Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simple, short, brutal. I liked this book a lot.