Short Money
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Desperate for cash, small town cop Joe Crow takes a security job that could cost him his life
Joe Crow celebrates his thirty-third birthday in his patrol car, watching for speeders and sniffing fat lines of cocaine. A depressed cop with a faltering marriage, a rotten stomach, and an increasingly expensive drug habit, Crow is just looking for a drink and a poker game when he steps into Birdy's. Instead, he meets a man who might be able to save his life—or destroy it.
He first notices Dr. Nelson Bellwether when the liposuction expert has a chair smashed over his head. A surgeon with a big mouth, a gambler's personality, and some serious debt to the IRS, he's on his way to deep trouble, and he's going to bring Crow along for the ride. Dr. Bellwether needs a bodyguard, and Crow is his man. Pretty soon, this small town cop will wish he had a bodyguard of his own.
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This exhilarating prequel to Drawing Dead is by turns funny and soulful and always unpredictable. Joe Crow has scraped bottom: he's lost his job as a cop for handcuffing the chief's troublesome nephew to his truck; he's got a cocaine problem; his marriage is on the rocks; his loathsome brother-in-law has just set him up as a bodyguard for Dr. Nelson Bellweather, the town liposuctionist; and it's a particularly grim winter in Minnesota. Bellweather feels threatened by the sociopathic Murphy clan, three dysfunctional generations of hunters and their matriarch who run a game preserve where, for the right price, they will procure any animal a client wants to shoot. Crow, suspecting that Bellweather himself isn't entirely innocent, finds himself entangled in a web of misunderstandings, crimes, near-crimes, lapses in judgment and inspired slapstick as each set of bumbling crooks tries to outmaneuver the others. Hautman's dialogue sparkles, his plot hums, he's got a nicely complex sense of morality and he's a virtuoso when it comes to describing what it feels like to get punched. Best of all is Joe Crow: moving among nuts and crazies; comparing Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous meetings (the coke addicts are funnier); breaking heads when necessary; and bonding with Milo, his cat. May he never learn that discretion is the better part of valor.
