A Choice of Nightmares - Softcover

Kostoff, Lynn

3.64

22 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0981557953 ISBN 13: 9780981557953

Publisher: New Pulp Press, 2015

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Robert Staples is on the verge of finally making it as a second-rate actor when his agent asks him to deliver a package. Staples promptly loses the package, forcing him into the heart of a bloody and highly lucrative drug-running operation. Pulled in all directions by desperate men, sociopaths, and a sexually alluring woman, Robert soon finds himself embracing the explosive lifestyle. Fast-moving and sharply written, A Choice of Nightmares is a modern-day roman noir about drugs and money, and the passions they ignite.

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About the Author:

Lynn Kostoff is a Professor of English and the Nellie Cooke Sparrow Writer-in-Residence at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC. His other highly praised crime novels include A Choice of Nightmares (available from New Pulp Press), The Long Fall, and Late Rain. He has also taught at the University of Alabama, Indiana State University, and Bowling Green State University in Ohio where he received his MFA in fiction.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Forget southern California--first-novelist Kostoff proves that southern Florida is the ideal location these dope-dealing days for the noir thriller. Here, Kostoff polishes up all the elements of the genre- -including the luckless antihero, the femme fatale with the dark past (which isn't getting any lighter in the present), and a bunch of near-psychotic malefactors with a taste for the double-cross and the infliction of fear and pain. The author even brings off the sort of wise-guy Chandleresque metaphors that can seem labored in less skilled hands. His protagonist, Robert Staples, an actor with a stalled career in B-pictures, is more passive than most. The action--until near the end, when it seems almost too late--happens to him and around him, beginning with the loss of a package that his talent agent asked him to deliver. His passivity is increased by the amount of cocaine he sniffs, and by dogging the heels of a sexually adroit, maddeningly desirable woman for whom love is a four-letter word more disgusting than most. Nevertheless, he wins sympathy for not kidding himself and simply wanting to stay alive. The locales, Miami and Key West, are powerfully drawn as fallen Edens, purgatories with palm trees where Cubans, retirees, tourists, drug agents, and deal dealers (hard to tell apart) rub shoulders. Treachery keeps the plot twisting and turning, and sometimes obscuring itself, like a snake swallowing its tale. But the reader will read on. A noir thriller that delivers with vivid writing, smart plotting, and a deeper-than-usual insight into its flawed central character. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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