Jitter Joint
A Novel of Suspense
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Jitter Joint, award-winning journalist Howard Swindle delivers Jeb Quinlin, a Dallas homicide detective combating crime-and his own personal demons.
"The weak and pitiful shall perish..."
Jeb Quinlin has been issued an ultimatum by his boss and his wife: dry out or get out. So he hits his favorite bar for a last fifth of Wild Turkey and reluctantly enters detox. Once inside, Jeb is forced to confront his years of alcoholism with the help of Librium, hard-core therapy, and AA meetings. But someone is taking the words of the Big Book too far, as rehab patients begin to die mysteriously, each tagged with one of AA's Twelve Steps. Now Jeb is on a sobering hunt for the Twelve-Step killer, a twisted psychopath who's taking the battle with the bottle to horrifying new heights...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Delirium tremens turns to trembling fear in this fast, tense fiction debut by Swindle, a three-time Pulitzer Prize- winner for newspaper editing. Under pressure from his boss, Captain Bill Barrick, and from his disaffected wife, hard-drinking homicide detective Jeb Quinlin finds himself off his Dallas beat and reluctantly drying out in a fancy AA clinic. Jeb's road to recovery is diverted, though, when the members of his therapy group (run by the loathsome Dr. Wellman Bergoff), one by one, turn up literally dead drunk. The AA slogans scrawled across the victims' corpses--"Our lives had become unmanageable" or "God grant me the serenity"--cause Jed to suspect an inside job. The violence escalates when Barrick puts him on the case, a move that threatens to push the detective off the wagon. Swindle (Trespasses: Portrait of a Serial Rapist) sweats his hero past multiple threats in a plot steeped in AA ambiance--perhaps too deeply for some readers' taste--without losing a suspenseful edge. Car chases and fight scenes are film-clip clear while goofy characters gel in a credible story with an ending that points, happily, to a possible series.
