Боб Трулак — новинки

Two-time loser Marty Pell had a one night stand with Lady Luck and four years later he's fresh out of prison, out of options and out of fucks to give. Pell is no longer incarcerated, but he's hardly free. The bastard child of that dubious encounter, the buried chunk of Uncle Sam's gold bullion, is just laying out there, begging to be claimed. With the help of fellow blue-collar opportunist and partner in crime, Shad Dupree, he sets out to find the fortune they stole—stole fair and square. Too bad they're not the only ones looking.

The waltz to this buried treasure crosses and double-crosses paths with bucketfuls of honorless thieves and murderous mercs. Once the winnowing begins, it leaves a trail of bodies straight to the end of the rainbow.

If Pell and Dupree can slip the Gordian knot of bloodletting and survive the mother-in-law of all cluster-fucks they might live long enough to be rich, very rich.

—Pop Noir caught up with Southern Gothic in a ramshackle joint just beyond the outskirts of Civility, Florida. The resulting issue of that dubious encounter is Bob Truluck. There’s luck enough to go around—grab you some.

Winner of the 1999 St. Martin's Press/ PWA Award for Best First Private Eye Novel

When we meet private detective Duncan Sloan he's just handed back a five thousand-dollar check meant as advance payment on a job. The wealthy prospective client wants Sloan to find a woman with an eyeball tattooed on her bottom. All he knows is the tattoo, that she's very young, white and probably somewhere in or near Orlando, Florida, Sloan's hometown. Thanks but no thanks; that's not enough. But when the five grand reappears in Sloan's mailbox, he uses it for a Costa Rican vacation and never mind the job.

Pike, however tracks him down. When he explains the assignment, Sloan finds it bizarre enough to say "yes." Isaac Pike is the only son of a top-ranked tycoon. He is also gay. Because he genuinely wants to be a father, he has deposited sperm with a reputable clinic while he searches for a suitable mother. But a paroled convict working at the clinic steals the sperm, impregnates a teenager with it, and blackmails Pike - send money or we abort the child.

Although Pike's idea of a suitable mother is not quite a waif from an Orlando trailer park, he is decent enough to be genuinely concerned about both mother and child.

Sloan pursues the thief and his buddies and, he hopes, the girl, through the Florida city's sad neighborhoods and outlying cheap motels, calling on his drug-enhanced informers and a contact in the police. Getting closer brings him to the mangled bodies of the young mother-to-be's relatives, and closer to his own danger as well. On he goes -- Duncan Sloan may be a reluctant detective, but when he's wound up he's hard to stop.

Street Level is Bob Truluck's first novel. It was chosen as the Best First Private Eye Novel of 1999 in the contest sponsored by Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin's Press.