Snappy, funny noir mashes up with vampires and unholy ritual in this entertaining caper - 5 stars.

Van H. Avram doesn’t know much about vampires, but he does know about women. They seem to follow him everywhere: skinny, blond, dead women who appear to have had the very life sucked out of their bodies. As evidence explodes and strange dogs attack him, Avram is forced, reluctantly, to concede that something supernatural may be afoot. In fact, if things get any weirder, he may have to conclude that he’s at the very center of it all.Steeped in 1950s PI glamour, it’s not hard to see the influence of Raymond Chandler in this energetic book. But Sucker also recalls Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, both in the absurdity of Avram’s interactions with his clientele and the cosmic implications of the cases he addresses out of his run-down yet barely affordable office. The book isn’t afraid to venture into overt goofiness, and in fact, this courage often invests it with a campy appeal that belies its complicated thematic mixture of noir, horror, and comedy.Armchair detectives will enjoy Sucker’s merry chase and strict adherence to the rules of its own universe. However, the story also leaves several loose ends untied, including a few baffling peripheral characters whose existence is never fully explained. It’s fairly easy to rationalize these based on clues present within the text, but readers who like their novels watertight may find that these little issues injure the book’s otherwise excellent polish.Several of the people who surround Avram seem like stock characters at first introduction but quickly develop into unique and unusual creatures born completely of the book’s own world. The book’s depiction of women as lusty vixens may strike some feminist readers as problematic, though others may consider this is a wink to classic pulp fiction. Even when inhabiting this gray area, Sucker’s characters are fun to watch, even when not completely believable.Stylistically, the book mimics the hard-bitten noir of the 1950s, but it updates linguistic and social conventions to better suit a modern audience. This choice works well, helping to imbue the book with sophistication that would have been absent in a straightforward homage to the genre. Sucker also adroitly handles enormous, even existential reveals in such a way that they fit into their context and remain surprising.The potential audience for this book is broad. Science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fans are all likely to be on board from the first page, especially those who have been prepped by the recent popularity of silly-seeming, but ultimately high-quality, genre-crossing titles like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. However, anyone who enjoys religiously inclined fiction while simultaneously wishing that the subgenre took itself less seriously will enjoy this imaginative romp.

Author Mark Lingane is back with a brilliant humorous mashup fantasy-sci-fi-Noir, “Sucker.” - 5 stars.

Private eye Van H. Avram is your typical Mickey Spillane throwback, just about getting away with doing his job in some kind of chaotic way. But all that changes when a mysterious “skinny blond” corpse is dumped on his doorstep, opening a door into the seedy underbelly of a world of human sacrifices and ancient lores that might just end civilization as we know it. Suddenly, Avram will have to step up as the hero, and save not just the day, but the entire world. But this might be a huge leap for the PI, who is struggling with his concept of reality as vampiric dames, demons and crazy ladies seem to chase him around a steampunk kind of town with a post-apocalyptic feel. With Avram be able to overcome his own problems to tackle probably the most important case he’ll ever face? This race against time tale will tell.Sucker is something of a Bladerunner-style novel, but it has a distinctBugsy Malone humor to it, with vampires to boot. As usual, Lingane has managed to throw a bunch of genres at the wall and they have melded beautifully into this universe where he is the creator of some pretty amazing sequences. There is a smattering of Michael Moorcock’s Cornelius Chronicles here, where dry humor and wit serve as bedmates to gory supernatural happenings and the twisting of reality. It’s hard to say exactly who would enjoy this book in particular, and actually who wouldn’t, because there’s a whole new ambience going on here that has the sense of a new audience being formed, a new genre being formed somehow. Yes, Lingane is that good. It shows that he is a well-traveled, far-flung discoverer in real life, because descriptions seem full and well-wrought. Although we’ve been fans of this author all along, there’s something even more quirky and interesting when you juxtapose real historical elements, at that, such strong iconic ones, to form a story like this one.There’s a Sin City narration to the prose that comic book fans will love, and some real corkers of one-liners (Just open the first page on Amazon to get a load of them, and a sense of what’s to come):Her bedroom eyes were framed by curls, half of which were tied up with a hairpin the shape of a broken heart.“You dress for cocktails.” I said.“You dress like a hobo. You like cocktails?”I shrugged. “I like free.”Lingane should do a series of these; Avram is a great character and it would be a shame to lose him after this one: he’s like Bogart on some kind of spacey drug in a distant-planet bar, with a hint of Sherlock Holmes and a dash of Bob Arctor. Thoroughly recommended to anyone who enjoys a detective novel with a twist, or for that matter, anyone with a penchant for escapism.