Eric Beetner

Beetner's Run For The Money takes an old pulp fiction staple of a crook
on the run from the law and injects it with so much energy that it's like
a freight train on steroids coming right at you. There's no attempt to
sugarcoat here. No attempt to pretend Slick and Bo have any
redeeming qualities. No attempt to write this one as if two innocent
men are wrongly accused and out to fight the dude who framed them.
These are just plain all-out bad guys and they have no compunctions
about anything show more from highway robbery to locking old ladies in closets to
attacking nuns, waitresses, and anyone else who comes across their
path.
Nor would you mistake this book for being a volume of Victorian
verses. It is solid all-out action on every page and from cover to cover.
Every page is worth reading. Don't skip any.
Dead-end losers, drug addicts, double crossers, vultures circling. This
is just what the doctor ordered when it comes to wild, crazy, well
written crime fiction. Five giant stars! show less

A staple of crime fiction has always been the man-on-the-run stories, often with both the law and the hoods after him. Yeah, this is one of those stories but it's been twisted and battered and plays out at breakneck speed. Throw in a gay prison lover, a Persian wife with an attitude, a price on his head, half the underworld on the prowl for him, and you've achieved a Hardboiled crime novella on steroids. This thing is carefully crafted and is not for the squeamish. It is dirty, violent, show more bloody, and will take you outside your comfort zone. show less

Eric Beetner’s top-notch novel, “The Devil Doesn’t Want Me,” is proof positive that we have entered another golden age of crime fiction. This book is so good that it is not at all clear what Beetner could possibly do as an encore. It has a hardboiled feel to it, but is firmly planted in a modern electronic age.
It is the story of an old hand at contract killing, Lars, who has been chasing down “Mitch the Snitch” for the family for seventeen years, sometimes coming close to finding show more him, but always just missing. Lars is the consummate professional killer, calm, cool, dispassionate. He has never wavered from his mission all these years and, in the hot desert land of New Mexico, he may be coming close. Lars had had no life outside the hunt for all these years and musically he is stuck in the early eighties heavy metal era. Curiously, this professional hitman also does yoga to keep limber.

Enter the young gun, Trent, who has no respect for Lars’ professional ways and can only see that through nearly two decades, Lars has not gotten the job done. Within days, iphone earbud-wearing Trent who has no respect for Van Halen or Motley Crue, finds his target and prepares to execute.

There is tension between these two men, one an ancient, withered man from another decade, another an unprofessional goofball bent on using modern technology. Lars doesn’t like being replaced and doesn’t like a hit being done unprofessionally- at the wrong time with the target’s family watching. Lars doesn’t like collateral damage. And, when the smoke clears, Trent may have gotten the kill, but Lars is off and running with Mitch’s not-so-cute, not-so-worldly, teenage daughter. From the old gun-young gun yin and yang of Trent and Lars facing off, you now have added to it the old hitman and young, innocent teenager driving cross-country with all the guns of the family and the FBI trained on them.

This is one terrific book and was an absolute joy to read from beginning to end. The prose is tight. The action is intense. The story is filled with humor. It is hard-edged and gritty and it just works real well. Could actually see this being made into a movie. show less

Hard-hitting yet big-hearted, this new series of crime fiction kicks off with a collection of hardboiled tales of corruption, adultery, payback, intrigue and outrage. This issue’s editor is Eric Beetner who is big on contemporary neo-noir, on cynical protagonists and gritty, witty, bitter-sweet storylines. He’s the master of the triple-switch plot-twist so it’s no surprise that his own story – which kicks off this compilation – is simply stuffed full of surprises. Beetner’s skill show more is in enhancing the action with the moral ambiguity of his characters; delicately demonstrating how easily some humans can shed their skins when it suits them.

The other seven stories are, in the main, similarly sophisticated. You can read them as uncompromising accounts of justified revenge and betrayal, or see past the blood-spatter, baseball bats and bullets to the subtle subtext. Art Taylor does this brilliantly in ‘Restoration’ where he neatly skewers the fear-mongering tactics of insurance industry without so much as bruising a knuckle. The action is similarly cerebral in the entertaining On Tilt by James Queally, where a game of Texas Hold ’Em is played for the highest stakes. Things turn a little lighter in ‘Tuning The Old Joanna’ by Tess Makovesky, while The Line by CJ Edwards is a stylish interpretation of undercover policing, a la The Wire.

Some of these stories are outright violent, explicit both in word and deed, but there was only one instance which felt as if the brutality of the characters was the core of the story. The majority manage to cram complex sub-plots concerning redemption, betrayal and human dignity into their scant number of pages. None are very long, and none out-stay their welcome. An interview with Beetner rounds out the anthology and makes for fascinating reading.

I would’ve preferred there to be a couple more stories in the collection – maybe ten, or even a dozen – because it did feel as if the fun ended just as I was getting into the swing of things. In any case, I’ll definitely be coming back to CSM for second helpings when Issue Two is released…
8/10

There's more detail on this book and other crime fiction over at
https://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/crime-syndicate-issue-one-p... show less