The Big Bitch by John Patrick Lang

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The Big Bitch
ISBN: 978-1-60381-303-7
Paperback: $17.95
Ebook: $4.95

Fraud is Doc’s business, but this was personal.

The Big Bitch (324 pages) is a work of mystery/suspense by debut author John Patrick Lang. After Doc’s friend Jesus is murdered, he searches for the killer while being paid to investigate a missing person’s case that takes him through a dozen cities and towns up and down the Pacific Coast, from Portland to San Diego. As he follows the baffling trail, he soon discovers that the clues lead uncomfortably close to home.

The Big Bitch is Book 1 in the Jackson “Doc” Holiday Mystery series.

“A clever, surprise-filled first novel and series opener.”  Read more….

—Publishers Weekly

“No-one is ever going to be as poetic as Marlowe, or a wise-ass and tough as Spenser, but Holiday has certainly made an impressive debut. The dialogue crackles, the humour is black, and the bad guys are suitably dissolute. One-liners fly off the page like sparks from a welding torch…. I suspect I am not the only member of the Jackson Holiday Appreciation Society, and I look forward to his next appearance.”  Read more….

—David Prestidge, Crime Fiction Lover.com

“John Patrick Lang’s highly entertaining first book, The Big Bitch, is a tale of murder, kidnapping, even a mutilation, set in the East Bay. It is told in gritty turgid prose with the brutal immediacy of the first person point of view, but with a generous leavening of humor, especially the Chandlerian similes (‘I’ll beat on you like a rented mule.’) As with most effective crime fiction, things are not at all what they seem. We hope to see much more Doc Holiday.”

—Armand Croft, author of The Andrew MacCrimmon novels

Private Eye Jackson “Doc” Holiday investigates fraud, a crime he knows intimately. He was once a respected and successful mortgage banker who laundered more than 100 million dollars in dirty money. Although never convicted, he has been blackballed from banking.

After his drinking buddy, a Catholic priest named Jesus Cortez, is shot dead in the driveway of Doc’s Berkeley home, he sets out to find his killer. The case takes him in search of an old confederate in Portland, where he begins to suspect that the murder of Jesus is connected to a money laundering scheme suspiciously similar to Doc’s own. As Doc delves in further, he crosses swords with a scheming matriarch, a bent cop, a femme fatale, and a master criminal. Whoever’s at the bottom of this business has already killed and is facing “The Big Bitch,” or life in prison. And they’re not afraid to kill again.

Says the author, “I was attracted to the noir genre because of its capacity to convey social and cultural perceptions, indict the false values of the American Dream, create existential allegory, and ultimately turn pulp into parable. Jesus Cortez is a young, handsome, charming Catholic priest who is purported to have performed miracles, but also a man with a mysterious past, a dark and dangerous secret, and evidently a woman or two stashed away somewhere. It seems to me that such a character could only be fully realized in a hard-boiled detective novel, particularly when the detective and narrator is a man called ‘Doc’ Holiday, a name that suggests a checkered past and the dark end of the street.”

By turns, John Patrick Lang has been a lit major, a submarine sailor, a country-western singer/songwriter and a mortgage banker specializing in community lending. A native of Portland, Oregon, he makes his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Big Bitch is his first novel.

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