Dia De Los Muertos (signed & dated)

When DEA agent Vince Calhoun's luck runs out, he becomes involved in a last-chance smuggling caper in Tijuana on the Mexican Day of the Dead

If "American noir" were in the dictionary, you might find Kent Harrington's picture in place of the definition. His first thriller, Dark Ride, starts with a quote from the Prince of Darkness himself, Jim Thompson: "The darkness and myself. Everything else was gone and the little that was left of me was going, faster and faster." His second, Dia de los Muertos, begins with lines from D. H. Lawrence and a Mexican folksong that say essentially the same thing: life is futile, violent, and nasty--and then you die. But along the way, Harrington, like Thompson before him, manages to give his readers a wonderful time. Rogue DEA agent Vincent Calhoun regards Mexico in general and Tijuana in particular as his own private playland: he augments his government salary by smuggling upscale aliens into the United States for a sinister British villain named Slaughter. "Without realizing it, Slaughter had gone to seed. All the money he was making in the rackets didn't seem to matter--it was as if Tijuana was infecting him and he couldn't stop it. He'd gone completely native in that peculiar English way." Calhoun's perfect world starts to come apart when, weakened by fever and gambling debts, he lets Slaughter pressure him into taking a 400-pound gangster named Frank Guzman into California. That scene, like the rest of this relentlessly gripping book, begs to be filmed.