Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Crime & mystery fiction

THE PAINTED GUN

Bradley Spinelli

A washed-up ex-journalist looking for a missing girl in San Francisco is framed by a Guatemalan hit man for a series of murders.

It’s 1997 at the dawn of the digital age in San Francisco. Ex-journalist and struggling alcoholic David “Itchy” Crane’s fledgling “information consultancy” business is getting slowly buried by bad luck, bad decisions, and the growing presence of the Internet. Before Itchy can completely self-destruct, a crooked private investigator offers him fifty grand to find a missing girl named Ashley. Crane takes the job because the money’s right and because the only clue to her disappearance is a dead-on oil portrait of Crane himself painted by the mysterious missing girl— whom he has never met.

As Crane’s search for Ashley rapidly becomes an obsession, he stumbles upon a series of murders, gets slapped around by thugs and intimidated by cops, and begins to suspect he’s being framed for the murders by a psychotic Guatemalan hit man. Left with no avenue but survival, Crane goes on the offensive, fighting to clear his name, solve the murders, and find the beguiling portrait artist Ashley, who may have a few surprises of her own.

Bradley Spinelli is the author of the novel Killing Williamsburg, and the writer/director of the film #AnnieHall, which the Village Voice called “fascinating.” He contributes regularly to Bedford + Bowery and lives in Brooklyn.

Available products
Book Published 2017-03-07 by Akashic Books
Book Published 2017-03-07 by Akashic Books

Comments

The Painted Gun is hardboiled like they don’t make anymore. Whiplash twists, razor-sharp prose, an addictive narrative—I couldn’t read it fast enough.

The Painted Gun is a fun and wonderfully reckless remix. Bradley Spinelli spins the conventions of noir and whips up a tasty postmodern dish. It’s an homage to yesterday, and also an examination of what’s thrumming outside our walls right now.

Spinelli gives us noir voices and atmosphere, a thrilling international plot, and—in the lovely, half-mad painter Ashley Fenn—a figure who embodies the seductive dangers of fine art. What more could you ask?

With a plot that winds up like a Swiss watch and then explodes like an RPG, Bradley Spinelli’s The Painted Gun pays off in every way a reader of noir ction wants it to, and provides a lovely bonus—some of the most sure-footed tough guy prose I’ve seen since Hammett and Chandler walked those mean streets. Spinelli’s novel pays homage to the conventions of detective ction while also spinning an original and terrifying web of violence, menace, and intrigue. A bravura performance by a writer of marvelous gifts.