Fireball - Softcover

Sangster, Jimmy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1732422680 ISBN 13: 9781732422681

Publisher: Brash Books, 2020

Synopsis

This is the long-lost, never-before-published fourth book in Jimmy Sangster's wickedly inventive, darkly funny, and critically acclaimed "James Reed" series of crime novels.

Ex-cop James Reed is a self-styled beach bum, living in the Malibu house he scored in the divorce settlement from his brief marriage to a famous actress. Life should be easy...but he has terrible luck. His first date with a woman he meets on a tennis court goes very, very bad, getting him beaten, accused of murder, and pursued by killers. And that's just in one night. Now he's trapped in nightmare of sex, blackmail and murder...and to get out, he must go to New York...and worm his way into the rotten core of the Big Apple.

Praise for the James Reed series:

"Crammed full of sex, drugs and Hollywood. This book is a bright evocation of La-La-Land. Welcome Mr. Reed. Come back soon." Hartford Courant

"Adept plotting and achingly human characters." Booklist

"An unusually shaped plot and vivid characters." Kirkus Reviews

"Excellently plotted and paced. Sangster constructs an intricate problem and lets his intelligent, complex hero loose to solve it." Publishers Weekly

"Read a couple of these James Reed novels and author Jimmy Sangster could get to be a habit." Anniston Star

"This is a fast-moving, funny, sexy -- very sexy -- story. James Reed is a very charming character." The Orlando Sentinel

About this title

About the Author

Jimmy Sangster was an acclaimed screenwriter (Curse of Frankenstein, Deadlier Than the Male, The Legacy, etc), director (Lust for a Vampire, Banacek, etc ) TV writer (Wonder Woman, Cannon, BJ and The Bear, Kolchak etc) and novelist. His many books include Touchfeather, Snowball, The Spy Killer, and Fireball, which was recently discovered among his papers.

Reviews

At the start of Sangster’s recently found, irreverent fourth James Reed novel (after 1987’s Blackball), Reed, a former London cop turned beach bum, meets Megan McCoy, an attractive visitor from New York, at L.A.’s West Malibu Tennis and Racquet Club. Their mutual attraction and her interest in renting his beach house lead to dinner and the hope of a more sensual encounter. After dinner, Megan is attacked in the club parking lot by her jealous, estranged husband, who has been stalking her. Despite Megan’s fears her husband will find her at her hotel, Reed drives her back to the hotel, where she’s found dead in her room the next day. Initially viewed by the police as a suspect, Reed begins an investigation that takes him to New York City, where he attempts to unravel the layers of deceptions surrounding Megan’s life. He soon realizes his life is in danger as multiple parties compete to get an envelope he found in Megan’s car containing a key to a locker, which contains blackmail material on her crooked employer. Raymond Chandler fans will welcome this posthumous gift from Sangster (1927–2011) Publishers Weekly

Anyone who loved those bloody and beautiful Hammer Film Productions horror movies from decades past perhaps noticed the offbeat name of one of the scriptwriters: Jimmy Sangster. Welshman Sangster wrote a number of them, directed a few, and moved to the U.S. to script TV shows. He also wrote a number of spy and crime novels before his death in 2011, the last being the smoothly entertaining Fireball. It was discovered, unpublished, among his papers at England's De Montfort University. The style is short sentence hard-boiled. The hero, James Reed, once a London copper, is living a deliciously pointless life in Malibu when a visit to a tennis court leads him into a world of mayhem, murder, and kinky sex. Wry, oblique humor is the big appeal here. A mark is "caught with his hormones down." A thug, unimpressed with Reed, observes, "Some tough guy you're turning out to be." Then, as with those Hammer films, the ending approaches, the urbanity ceases, and the final scenes turn dark and violent. Old-school fare for committed old-schoolers. Booklist

Edition details

• Publisher: Brash Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1732422680
• ISBN 13: 9781732422681
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230