Flinch

His last novel, Heartbreaker, was called by the Chicago Tribune “recklessly exciting and wildly funny. [It leaves the] reader gasping for air and begging for more.” With Flinch, Robert Ferrigno’s electrifying and darkly funny new novel, we get what we’ve been waiting for.

At the center is Jimmy Gage, a tabloid writer for Slap magazine who’s been contacted by someone calling himself “The Eggman,” a serial killer who has laid claim to six unsolved murders around Los Angeles—except the whole thing is declared a publicity hoax by the police, who’ve branded Jimmy a publicity hound.

But then a year later, crime-scene photographs of the murders turn up in the possession of Jimmy’s brother, Jonathan, a high-profile plastic surgeon. Although Jimmy acknowledges that this makes Jon-athan a suspect, he also realizes that this might be simply one more round in the psychological games the brothers have been playing—and Jonathan mostly winning—since they were children. It’s a twisted sibling rivalry newly charged by Jonathan’s recent marriage to Jimmy’s former girlfriend.

Throw into the mix Jonathan’s impeccable standing in the community (as compared to Jimmy’s lack of one) . . . the female detective who can’t decide which brother to believe . . . and the thugs, con-artists, baby-faced brainiacs, and hard-edged women who are potentially lethal distractions in Jimmy’s life.

But the distractions will have to wait: Jimmy’s committed to discovering the identity of the killer, and no one gets a better pay-off from his obsession than the reader of this edgy, fast-forward, unstoppably entertaining novel.

Robert Ferrigno is the author of five previous novels, including Heartbreaker and The Horse Latitudes. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.