Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club

This first novel for Brian A. Hopkins features one Martin Zolotow, a rough hewn, ex-cop with a soft spot for well-turned ankles and a hard fist for nasty, bad guys. He's puppy-dog lovable and wild-animal rugged all in the same breath.The story opens with Zolotow ("Zolo" to his friends and the ladies) painfully parting with his current lover, a young hooker he's taken off the streets, loved, and is putting on a plane that will send her back to an innocent life with her family. What he finds out immediately after her departure is that some rather creepy bad-guys are waiting to abscond him and whisk him away to... Oklahoma City!Once in the Sooner state, Zolo's taken to a secluded stronghold somewhere in the OK panhandle, but not before he's recruited to rescue the daughter of a major crime figure. His incentive (besides just staying alive) is the young woman he had just put on the plane. He fails; she dies.Put through his paces in this wild, action-packed adventure, Zolo battles both the members of the Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club (they're originally from Ohio and not native Oklahoman bad blood) and his own muddled memory, an affliction that is at once his Achilles heel and a strange endearing quality. He's beaten with a ball bat, dragged through cow manure, chased, and shot at, but never totally thwarted because the poetry-spouting detective's acerbic wit and undaunting sense of what's right makes him too driven to stay down. Oh, and also some very lovely women come to his aid.Mix in a snarling dog, a gaunt bad-guy in a wheelchair, some women who can handle both being sexy in bubble baths and in employing martial arts kicks--oh, and vampires!--and the action is non-stop!Hopkins takes the reader on a wild romp with sure ease in his knowledge of weapons, chemistry, and women. Yet it's Zolo's revealing himself as kindhearted as Joe R. Lansdale's Hap Collins (and just as unlucky!) and as blindly chivalrous as John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee that make Zolo a whole new breed of hero, the kind who would attack a windmill on a seatless motorcycle in a tiger print bikini brief to save a lady! But that's another adventure all together.

I've been a fan of Brian A. Hopkins's short fiction for years. He has a way of bringing the reader into the depths of a character's mind and soul, whether they want to be there or not. I find myself being dropped into his stories, rather than simply reading them. You don't even know it's happening until you're done, and exhausted. It's a sure sign of a smooth and confident writing style. However, picking up Brian's first full-length novel, I didn't know what to expect. I mean, with a title like The Licking Valley Coon Hunter's Club, I had to assume it was going to be a LITTLE lighter than his usual fare. My assumption was correct, but the crisp writing, the feeling that you, as the reader, are in the story rather than simply an outsider, is there as much as ever. Without rehashing the plot as earlier reviews have done, I WILL say that this book starts with a bang, grabs you by the hair and drags you along on one of the most bizarre and wild adventures I've read in a long time. I was bruised and bullied as badly as Mr. Zolotow, and loved every minute of it. I found myself hoping the author would keep up the break-neck pace until the end, like a kid on a carnival ride not wanting it to ever stop. He didn't disappoint. We occasionally leap into the past, to a quiet interplay between Martin and a police psychiatrist, and the subtle mind games each play against the other, but we're in these moments only long enough to catch our breath, when the ride starts up again.Is this a horror novel? Well, sort of. I'd be more likely to classify it as an action/mystery story. Take the fun of a Grafton, the action and violence of Block, a likeable main character as you might find in a Hillerman novel, put them together with the voice and style of one of the best new writers out there today, and you've got an eclectic, fast-paced, sometimes-nasty but always-fun read.

Take a sarcastic private detective, add in rednecks from Oklahoma, genetically engineered vampires and enough action for three John Woo movies and you've got a killer debut novel. Hopkins delivers and he's got a bright future ahead of him. Get in on the ground floor and hang on for a wild and fun ride.

Brian A Hopkins has outdone himself! This story involving out favorite PI Martin Zolotow has it all! If you want a love story, this is it, if you want vampires, this is it, if you want a boring, dull, uninteresting story of a PI looking for baddies...this is NOT it! BAH does not hold anything back. It is hard to briefly describe a BAH story, and this story is no exception. There are damsels in distress, a hero who always get the snot beat out of him (but, does that stop him? NOOOOO!), and even vampires. The action is non-stop, and down and dirty, with just enough love interest to keep it interesting! This is my favorite Zolotow story. Ice Castles (BAHs MUCH anticipated follow-up to Cold At Heart) should only further cement BAH as one of this century's top science fiction writers!

A private investigator novel at it's heart, this fabulous book crosses over into so many other genres, in such entertaining, insightful, creative, clever, and wickedly witty ways, I was having cerebral orgasms as I whipped through the pages, breathlessly awaiting the next fabulous development, which is rarely more than a page or two away. When this much fun is packed into so tight a package, there should be a warning label about the potential for the volatile mixture to explode in your brain, a situation which could lead to a permanent, one-way trip to a multi-faceted-consciousness that will never let you see the world in the tired old way in which you're accustomed to seeing it, again. If you don't want to risk this kind of mind-expanding literary experience, you're browsing in the wrong isle. But give it a try, anyway, no one has ever been sorry to take a path like this before, and you can believe me, because I never lie, and I'm always right. No brag, just fact.