Blast from the Past (Kinky Friedman Novels)

Kinky's back, and Abbie Hoffman's got him. Or he's got Abbie. Or a mysterious man with dirty blonde hair and a faded camouflage jacket has them both in his gunsights. It's always hard to tell who the bad guys are, because the country-western singer turned author draws an almost invisible line between his real life and his fictional adventures. That, of course, is where the fun comes in. In Blast from the Past, the Kinkster serves up an appetizer for his myriad fans–a prequel to such novels as Roadkill and The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover. The book explains how Kinky got into the detecting game and met up with the Greenwich Village irregulars who populate this popular series–Ratso, Rambam, McGovern, and the luscious Stephanie DuPont. The action takes place in the post-Watergate 1970s, when Abbie's hiding out in upstate New York, sex and drugs are de riguer, and nobody's ever heard of political correctness. The mystery is pretty simple–you can see the ending coming long before Kinky can–but that's never been the point of these bawdy, irreverent tales. To quote Friedman himself, "Being a private dick is pretty simple. Once you run out of cocaine, crazy ideas, and self-pitying bullshit, you're eventually left with the truth." –Jane Adams