What Is Time to a Pig?
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
In this mind-bending crime novel by Shamus Award–winner John Straley, one man attempts to save his town from nuclear annihilation.
It’s been seven years since Gloomy Knob landed in the Ted Stevens High-Security Federal Penitentiary and five years since the end of the war, the one North Korea started when they sent a missile to Cold Storage, Alaska. Serving a life sentence for the murder of his sister, Gloomy spends histime trying to forget the past.
Then one day, Gloomy is snatched from his off-site work station. Instead of celebrating his newfound freedom, Gloomy comes unmoored—he feels he belongs in prison. But his kidnappers believe Gloomy knows where a second nuclear warhead is hidden and demand to know where it is. The clock is ticking, and Gloomy knows that unless he finds the missing warhead fast, or his wife, his friends, and the entire town of Cold Storage will be obliterated. The only problem? He has no idea where it is.
As Gloomy struggles to escape, the memories he fought hard to repress begin to creep out from the strange corners of his mind, first in rivulets, then in waves. In a drug-induced haze, Gloomy makes a discovery that may just bring him the closure he desires—if it doesn’t kill him first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 2027, Straley's delightfully absurd third Cold Storage novel (after 2014's Cold Storage, Alaska) takes place five years after the end of a brief war in which a poorly aimed missile fired by the North Koreans dropped unexploded warheads around southeastern Alaska. None of this means much to Gloomy Knob, who's been incarcerated for seven years in a prison near the town of Cold Storage for his sister's murder, until some well-meaning folks snatch him from an off-site work detail in the mistaken belief that he can locate an unaccounted for nuclear warhead. Though Gloomy is willing to help save Cold Storage and its inhabitants, including his wife, there's one minor problem: he has no idea where the bomb is. Unhinged by his newfound freedom, Gloomy is nearly as unstable as the warhead he has been sprung to find. Desperate to return to prison to continue his sentence, Gloomy begins remembering too much for his own good and the good of others. Straley upturns the Alaskan landscape like Carl Hiassen flipped Florida with wildly imaginative stories and droll characters.
