I don't do that often, deliberately tell you what to buy. I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it was important. Important for who exactly? Yeah, it's important for Matthew McBride. His book needs to sell. Yeah, I know McBride too. We swapped emails here and there and chit-chat on social media. So what? I'm not trying to be ethical here. You also have to know that I have a closer relationship to this novel, than to its writer. So what is there to FRANK SINATRA IN A BLENDER that's so important?
Short answer, it's fucking good. Long answer, it's fucking good and it never really had a chance to reach the masses before New Pulp Press decided to give it a go. The novel was published last year in eBook by Concord Press, with a terrible cover and it took about eighteen months for it to find a paperback home and a killer cover, thanks to NPP guru Jon Bassoff. Now that it'll be available in book stores, expect FRANK SINATRA IN A BLENDER to find a demented film director and undergo a silver screen adaptation that guarantee it both infamy and immortality.
Why?
Short answer, it's absolutely bonkers. Long answer, Nick Valentine is about 1) the greatest functioning alcoholic ever written and 2) one of the freshest PI characters the genre have seen in many years. The story is about money and greed, and yet, McBride integrates these variables to his story, not like they were the greatest evil to the human condition, but as vices any given soul is likely to give in to. Put that with a terrific cast of psychopathic characters, humor, darkness, narrations in both first and third person and a rugged St-Louis underworld, centered around a place named Cowboy Roy's. Is there anything more somebody can ask from a novel?
No.
You don't need to be into crime fiction to like FRANK SINATRA IN A BLENDER (or FSIAB, for the initiates). You only need to be into good stories and have a good stomach (it can get pretty graphic at times). Everybody loved it, even Charlie Sheen did (the real one). So whether you walk up to your favorite book store or order it from the internet, DO IT. You will be thankful afterwards, your life will change for the better and you will, like me, sing the gospel of this cult hit.
or
just order it from your favorite bookstore....
No need to thank me afterwards. Just read the damn thing.