This title is a clever and original crime/thriller from the author of the highly acclaimed Smoked . Set in New York, the novel follows the adventures of ex-con Dick, who comes round from what feels like quite a bender to find that there's a corpse in the boot of his Oldsmobile. It's Dot, recently his boss on the Breakout Program and also his on/off girlfriend. That's bad enough, but Dick honestly doesn't know whether he shot her himself or whether someone else did it. Meanwhile Dot's friend Lydia is wondering what the hell has happened to her co-conspirator - they've been embezzling the company and they're due to fly to Nassau with the proceeds shortly. And if Dick needed any more bad news, Dot's former squeeze, the very powerful, very clever, very dangerous Nestor Garcia, is headed for Manhattan, having decided he wants Dot back. He won't be at all happy to discover that the chances of a reconciliation are nil, unless necrophilia counts. A brilliant cast of characters plus some shockingly violent action blended with dark humour make Patrick Quinlan's second novel an entirely satisfying follow-up to Smoked .

'Patrick Quinlan's follow-up to his assured debut, SMOKED, is a well-plotted New York thriller... Quinlan delights in wrong-footing the reader. This is a fast-moving, hugely entertaining thriller' -- Observer 20070610 'A fine second thriller (after 2006's Smoked). Quinlan brings to glorious life several offbeat, at times deviant characters from roads less travelled. The plot hurtles along like an express train to its smashing climax.' -- Publishers Weekly 20070316 'Dismembered bodies and other nasty greetings begin to fall out of Quinlan's unhurried prose, which loops back and forth in time, and through soured deals and seamy scams, in a faint echo of Tarantino's mazy Pulp Fiction' -- Financial Times 20070316 'This is the stuff - violent, pacy, stylish and funny' -- Mirror 20070316 'Quinlan is a confident storyteller who revels in twists and turns' -- Metro 20070316 'An artfully plotted yarn... Quinlan has something of [Elmore] Leonard's gift for making his amoral cast sympathetic, even lovable, though the real baddie, the bullet-riddled Nestor Garcia, is memorably nasty' -- Telegraph 20070316

Patrick Quinlan grew up in New York, the youngest child in a big, noisy Irish-American family. He has worked in journalism and politics. He lives on the coast of Maine with his wife.