"When the son of a Pit Lord is murdered in Hollywood, the celestial beings in charge of the Four Realms ask Raymond Adams to figure who did it and find the victim’s missing soul. Without memories of his life, he accepts the case to gain eternal peace."
Pages: 230 pages
Publisher: Self Published on June 2012
Form: E-book (from tour for an honest review)
Genre: Supernaturals Mystery/Detective
Series: The Elohim Trilogy #1
Amazon: Buy / $3.44 (Kindle) ( EU price, click to see yours )
Barnes & Noble: Buy / $0.99 (Nook)
Smashwords: Buy / $0.99 (E-book)
"In 1947, a gangster murders private investigator Raymond Adams. In 2011, he’s brought back to life for 24 hours to solve the supernatural murder of a Hollywood Adult film star.
When the son of a Pit Lord is murdered in Hollywood, the celestial beings in charge of the Four Realms ask Raymond Adams to figure who did it and find the victim’s missing soul. Without memories of his life, he accepts the case to gain eternal peace. But the job is daunting:
24 hours to nab a killer...
24 hours to find a missing soul...
24 hours to unravel the victim’s exotic private life...
24 hours to stop a plot to send the universe into chaos...
With only the help of a possessed cop and a medium, Adams must trek through a Hollywood underground filled with pornography, prostitutes, the homeless, and sadists, along with supernatural monsters. But can he solve the case when his own haunting memories keep surfacing, telling him exactly what kind of man he was in life?" ~From Goodreads
I loved that Raymond was out there in the current day with a suit and fedora looking like a zombie the first few hours, after all his body was reanimated so I can't be perfect right away. He was all kinds of fun to read, he definitely was a detective through and through, hard edges and all - but he definitely had a little bit of that survival mode where he could adapt to modern Hollywood.
I loved the language, the dames and other novelty words that made Raymond more believable. I won't go into the plot too much, so I won't ruin it for anyone, but it's Good! If you enjoy the 40's detective stories then you'll love this! I sure did!
Now don't forget to see the Guest Blog below from Corsair on Noir!
And below that will be the Giveaway! Check this swag out! This Fantastic swag is composed by: 1 paperback of Absolution, 1 keychain, 1 bookmark, 1 magnet, 1 hat, 1 magnifying glass and 1 pair of shades and it's INTERNATIONAL!
Rating :
Absolution is only $0.99/£0.77 for as long as the tour lasts! ( until July 3rd! )
Noir
by Louis Corsair
That piece of dialogue is not in the wonderful novel, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, but the theme behind it is there. In the novel, The Big Sleep, Marlowe, another private investigator, comments that a dead person, "sleeps the big sleep" and they don't care about where they're buried or who mourns them. These are dark sentiments. It makes sense that the film version of Raymond Chandler’s and Dashiell Hammett’s novels fall into what is known as Film Noir.
In classic Film Noir, the protagonist wasn't always a detective. Sometimes they were gangsters or simple men who had committed crimes for their self-benefit. And they were always doomed in the end--if you really paid attention you could see that they were doomed from the beginning. Some examples of this are the two movies named above and also: Double Indemnity; Murder My Sweet; In a Lonely Place; and Touch of Evil. I named my favorites, but there are dozens of others.
These were post-WWII stories that looked at the world in a cynical way, intermingling lust and greed. Their immoral protagonists trudged through muck easily because they were muck. They gave us that special lens into the type of darkness that exists in human nature. These sentiments already existed in written fiction, particularly crime fiction and the hardboiled detective fiction of the 1920 and 30s. I happened upon this genre thanks to the movie version of The Maltese Falcon.
Up until then I thought that detective novels were like the novels of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle--those that included a mental puzzle that the reader and detective could solve together. They didn't appeal to me as much because the murders they depicted are very precise and lack the cruelty and raw passion of real murders. But Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe showed me a different sort of detective fiction.
As I said, it was a defining moment because that was when I knew I would someday write stories like that. Detective fiction has since become a favorite of mine and had things gone just a little bit differently in my life, I like to think I would be wearing a detective badge instead of writing about them.
When I began to give some serious thought to Absolution, I knew I would have a detective in the novel. The original seed for the novel was a news-story about the gruesome murder of an adult film actor. And right away I included magic in it; the murder was supernatural. To help me realize my vision, I turned to the experts on the subject.
Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher, Mike Resnick, Simon R. Green popularized the Urban Fantasy detective. In my research, I noticed that these detectives were (at least in their first novels) similar to Philip Marlowe. The reason for the Marlowe characteristics is obvious: We all share a love for the hardboiled detective and Marlowe is the easiest to get behind as a reader. He is our moral compass in a tough city; a blueprint for the protagonist of Heroic Fantasy, but in the urban setting.
And only a blueprint; Resnick’s John Justin Mallory is more of a comedic homage to the hardboiled detective; Dresden is closer to Marlowe, but he has since grown; Anita is also a hardboiled protagonist. For all their death and bloodshed, most Urban Fantasies are remarkably chaste when it comes to social issues (especially controversial ones), but not so much when it comes to sex. This is not surprising since there is no bigger buzz kill than talking about how fast our society is going downhill. Yet, I didn’t dismiss this thought right away.
What I wanted was a more "urban" Urban Fantasy. I needed a protagonist to confront the existential crisis of the setting, of the men and women lost in our Hollywood. And I also wanted that sense of doom that accompanied the protagonists of Film Noir. My detective would be doomed from the very beginning and he would fight this nit and grit throughout the story.
But the kind of tale I had in mind did not mesh well with the types of stories found in current Urban Fantasy detective novels. And I didn’t want to surrender the fantasy. I had to reconcile the two visions I had: 1) Have a realistic setting that did not hide or shy away from the nastiness of urban Hollywood and with a true Noir feel; 2) Use Hollywood as the setting to an Urban Fantasy that would incorporate magic and action and other fantastic things.
I decided that a wizard or a human with a supernatural gift or a vampire or vampire hunter just wouldn’t be right for this job. They are too much a part of fantasy-heavy Urban Fantasies.
I played with the idea of magically rejuvenating a detective in a retirement home. The problem with that was that this detective would have lived through the 1950s and 60s and 70s, etc. and would have lost his 1940s edge. My next idea was to have the ghost of a dead detective possess a detective from today. But I don't really like ghost stories. Call that my prejudice.
The simplest idea was the one that came to me last: Why not bring back to life a dead 1940s detective?
This excited me so much that I ran with it. I would have the hardboiled detective from the 1940s wander through a realistic Hollywood setting, which would give my novel a noir edge, while at the same time keeping the fantasy element of most Urban Fantasy detectives
Swagbag containing 1 paperback of Absolution, 1 Keychain, 1 Bookmark, 1 Magnet, 1 Hat, 1 Magnifying glass and 1 Pair of Shades! ( international )
( Unfortunately I don't have the Rafflecopter Code for this so just drop by HERE to sign up on the Rafflecopter for the Swag! )
