This is my first time that I have reviewed this author's books AND I LOVED IT!! I almost felt sorry for Glenn as he had a tough life as he came back from Viet Nam with no honor guard, but slurs. He had left brothers to die over there, only years later to find his mom had died in a car accident and his dad had to get his brain stuffed back in his head. When a woman asked for his help to get her dead son out of Mexico, he did not have the heart to refuse her, besides he needed the money, but he never planned to have a small time drug lord to send his two goons to go after him and try to kill him! ( )

An electronic copy of this book was provided for review by publishers Fawkes Press, via Library Thing.

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Bounty hunter and private detective Glenn Helka is eking out a bare living in a mid-1970s Texas border town when an angry and distraught mother hires him to retrieve her son’s body from the Mexican hamlet where he has met with a bad end. Tired of sparring with corrupt officials and doling out an apparently endless stream of bribes, she offers up a cool five grand, no questions asked, for the job. (Readers who think this is reminiscent of the Hoyt Axton song ‘Darrel and Judy’ won’t be far off the mark.)

Helka doesn’t spend much time pondering the morality of the gig. He just sets his young sidekick, Paco, off in search of a vehicle, begins a losing argument with his secretary, Paloma, over whether she is included in the caper, and starts putting a loosely-wrapped plan together. But before he does that, he has to have a serious discussion with a local pawn-shop owner slash drug dealer over the inadvisability of using Paloma’s young brother to distribute his product.

This is significant, because said entrepreneur takes the whole thing rather badly and sends a couple of hit (actually, hit-or-miss) men out with orders to make sure Helka and anyone who is with him never makes it back from his planned trip.

And this sets off a fast-paced, gritty, and occasionally Quixotic adventure with bad guys, good cops, coyotes (not the four-legged kind), heat, sand, and the threat of imminent violence throughout.

Sanders has a good handle on his noir-ish hero and definitely brings the heat. He’s got an inventive plotline and good pacing. But he loses a few points for missing the cynical black humor of most noir adventures, hitting hard on the bass notes of gloom, despair, and general the-world-is-a-cesspool funk without an occasional rimshot to brighten things up. He also lards the story with a couple of extraneous plotlines, and unless he’s setting up for a series here, the backstories about Helka’s Vietnam War experiences and his struggles with a mentally unstable father constitute baggage that should have been checked at the door for this one. ( )

I have no idea why I requested this! ( )