The Edgar-nominated author of Gun Monkeys is back with a
thrill-a-minute suspense novel that mixes crime and academia--with
hilarious results. Here Victor Gischler draws us into a wild and wicked
world, where tenured professors are busy burying bodies, cash-up-front
P.I.'s hunt for missing coeds and one desperate street-tough has to
decide which he'd rather be: a live poet or a dead criminal.
An unlucky grad student just got himself killed in a robbery gone bad.
And as lowly drug lieutenant Harold Jenks races with the killer out of
the alley, a light goes off in his head: He'll steal the dead kid's
identity. Now Jenks, who once lorded it over seven square blocks in East
St. Louis, is headed due west. With a .32 in his pocket, a 9mm Glock
taped across his back, and a rap sheet nearly as long as Finnegans Wake,
he's cruising the halls of academia as Eastern Oklahoma U's newest grad
student, looking for action and hoping he can stay one couplet ahead of
his violent past. While this new bad boy on campus makes mincemeat of
his metaphors, across campus visiting professor Jay Morgan has a more
pressing problem: What to do about the dead coed in his bed. The
professor's no killer, but try telling that to private eye Deke Stubbs.
With the professor on the lam and Stubbs hot on his trail, more trouble
blows into town. Now, as St. Louis drug boss Red Zach and his minions
converge on Fumbee, Oklahoma, looking for a consignment of missing
cocaine, the bullets start flying faster than the zingers at a faculty
hate fest. For Morgan and Jenks, now desperate fugitives from poetic
justice, survival means learning new skills--and learning fast. Because
if they find out they're bottom-of-the-class, that means they're already
dead. Featuring the sleaziest, sorriest, and most captivating group of
criminal lowlifes, sexed-up academics, poets, and rappers ever to
collide in one crime novel, The Pistol Poets speeds deliriously to its
electrifying payoff.
