Nice Guys Finish Dead

With one best-seller to his name, former sixties radical Albie Marx has been resting on his laurels for twenty years, but when his lover is found dead, he realizes that past glories will not help him beat a murder rap

Screenwriter Debin's first mystery has plenty of attitude. His drunken hero Albie Marx, a self-styled "Herald of the New Apocalypse," is a '60s relic who wrote one big book and now contributes a column to an alternative paper called Up Yours . When his lover Linda is murdered, Albie becomes the prime suspect in the eyes of Lt. Joe Danno, who still believes the former hippie was somehow implicated in Janis Joplin's death 20 years earlier. Linda's daughter Mariah, "a third-degree black belt existentialist," joins with Albie to follow a convoluted trail from L.A. to Philadelphia to Florida to a Caribbean island where the U.S. government is turning a tropical plant into a designer drug called NICE. Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen provide the novel's soundtrack; wrongdoers include the Revolutionary War buff who manufactures NICE and Ahmed Ludi, "the greatest record producer in the history of rock 'n' roll." Despite generally punchy writing, the plot takes so long to unravel that readers may well forget--or not care enough to remember--who murdered whom and why.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Who shot gentle environmental activist Linda Selby full of heroine and strung her body from her bedroom ceiling? Hard-headed LAPD Lt. Danno thinks it was her most recent lover, fossilized 60's radical Albie Marx--so Albie joins forces with Linda's long-unacknowledged daughter Mariah to find out the truth. A sheaf of stolen papers in a Hollywood postbox leads the two to your basic government conspiracy to invade the Caribbean island of Libertad and harvest their crop of salvia plants to synthesize into NICE, a heavy narcotic that makes its users think, hey, everything's okay, no problem. Can jogging, tequila- chugging Albie and his buddies (his editor Shrike at Up Yours, innocuous NICE inventor Felix St. John, and an unlikely bevy of lovelies) make the crucial connections in visionary retired singer Ahmet Ludi's Libertad paradise to name Linda's killer in time to head off pursuing Danno, the CIA, and the President's chief of staff? Hey, no problem. If you've been waiting 30 years for a gonzo detective story, here it is--a first novel with a series waiting in the wings. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Soon after police blame aging ex-hippie Albie Marx for the murder of his current girlfriend, he accidentally meets her crooked-politician ex-lover, falls in lust with her luscious adopted-out daughter, and acquires a sheaf of stolen documents relating to a government drug-legalization conspiracy. As false assumptions proliferate, a Mouse That Roared mentality meshes with a High Adventure scenario: Albie and cohorts chase across America and the Caribbean looking for the ultimate high. Debin offers fine descriptions, amusing situations, and a raised eyebrow or two, but solving the murder falls by the side. A solid first novel.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.