Three owners of borderline skid-row gin mills hatch a dingbat scheme to bolster their revenues by, what else?, murdering the competition. The Competition is the only decent guy around, it seems; the honest owner/operator of the only watering hole in the area where you'd even trust the ice.
The three co-conspirators, no master criminals to begin with, set off a series of Rube Goldberg missteps and quickly begin to be devoured by their own scheme.
When the intended victim's bodyguard gets wind of the plot, the whole landscape darkens, and the second half of the novel becomes an accelerating, cinematic slide into a truly demonic and violent denouement, and a life-or-death climax you will never see coming.
This book is at once very funny, genuinely frightening, elegantly crafted, and boasts one of the most truly frightening villains I have even encountered in print or film.
-Rodney Deming, screenwriter
