OUT NOW!!! The Skintight Shroud by Wayne Dundee

The blurb: Rockford, Illinois has quite a thriving adult-film industry. Oh, the more ambitious productions—the full-length sound features that play what’s left of the adult-theater circuit and vie for the various awards the X-rated community has created for itself—are still done primarily on the coasts. But the less pretentious fare, your basic quickies made directly for home rental and mail-order sales and the silent, 10- to 15-minute shorts that play in the peep booths—loops, they’re called in the industry—are being churned out all across the country. Let’s face it, even the Kama Sutra has a limited number of positions. So the name of the game becomes new faces and new bodies. 

Two of those new faces and new bodies constitute my latest case. Jason Hobbs was stabbed to death, his body found in a ditch alongside a back road in rural Boone County. The second victim, Valerie Pine, was strangled and her nude corpse discovered by her roommate in their southside apartment.

My job is to establish not so much who did kill Jason and Valerie but rather who did not. My clients? The people who made those films that featured those two young people—swarthy fellows whose last names end mostly in vowels.
I hardly have a crowd of alternate clients piled up back at my office. And it promises to be—at the very least—infinitely more interesting and challenging than the series of surveillance jobs and till-tapper nabbings I’ve been existing on for what seems like forever. When you’ve got a trace of bloodhound pulsing through your veins, it’s hard to resist the scent of an exciting hunt, no matter how nasty the terrain it threatens to take you through. And that’s the other side of the coin: the terrain in this particular case had the potential of getting very nasty indeed. Perhaps downright unsavory.

Any way you cut it, this definitely beats the shit out of watching through one-way glass for some wide-bottomed, hired-for-the-holidays store clerk to shortchange a customer and then try to stuff the difference down her dress.

So I’d soil my hands a little on some Syndicate bread—hell, we all do that much in hundreds of incidental ways every day. It’s called laundering, folks. I don’t have to feel good about it, but as long as I keep my investigation clean, I can live with it.

About Wayne Dundee.

I have been writing short stories and novels about my PI protagonist Joe Hannibal since 1982. Although I have gotten decent critical reception (including nominations for an Edgar, an Anthony, and six Shamus Awards) I have never enjoyed very good sales. Hopefully with the previously out-of-print Hannibal novels now being re-issued as eBooks (Kindle for now, Nook and so forth to follow) that trend can be bumped upward.

In the beginning, in the initial short stories, Hannibal was basically just another sock-and-shoot “Mike Hammer wannabe”. As the series grew into novels, however, (and I say this meaning in no way to renouce my admiration for Spillane and his influences on me and my work) Hannibal evolved into something a bit more as far as far as the depth of his personal background/characterization and also that of the cases and people — both good and bad — he became involved with.

This was due largely to a combination of my own blue collar/small town upbringing and the small-city setting (Rockford, Illinois) that I chose for Hannibal to operate out of. Thug-infested inner city canyons were simply not a part of his world.

Nowadays, in the current and forthcoming Hannibal titles, he has relocated along with his creator to west central Nebraska for a whole new phase of his career. But wherever Joe is, readers will always find action, surly encounters, healthy doses of humor and sex, and hopefully a surprising plot twist or two.

THE SKINTIGHT SHROUD is set still  back in Hannibal’s Rockford days. It remains one of my favorites.

If you wish to learn more about me and my work .you can check out my web site at www.waynedundee.com or my blog at http://fromdundeesdesk.blogspot.com