Kindle Edition Download to your Nook (eBook) Amazon New Pulp Press Category:  Crime Publisher: New Pulp Press Type: Fiction Pages: 307 Copyright: January 1, 2016 Price: $4.99 (eBook) Here we encounter the controlled madness of two men, one a former cop, the other a misfit and killer of women. Nocturne for Madness is about the controlled madness of two men, one a former cop, the other a killer of women. Ohio private investigator Thomas Haftmann is hounded by his twin demons of gambling and drinking when he is thrust into a statewide manhunt for the serial killer sensationalized in the tabloid press as the “Jack-in-the-Box Killer,” named for his grotesque crime scenes the police discover in his wake.    Excerpt Nocturne for Madness “No pleasure [in life] but meanness.” --the Misfit, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” Winter, Jefferson-on-the-Lake, Northern Ohio Chapter 1 Thomas Haftmann dreamed all night of ortolans. Those delicate birds like sparrows that French gourmands cooked in their own grease and were eaten whole, the birds’ feet sticking out of the eaters’ mouths. The tiny bills being spat onto expensive plates. He had seen it once like that in New Orleans. They wore sheets over their heads to keep blood and hot juices spattering anyone nearby. The ortolans were held by tiny strings to their feet and were gently nibbling cracked corn from his hand. One by one he ate them, indifferent to the gore jetting from his mouth as he clamped his jaws around each bird. He could not get enough of them; they were sticky and sweet. In the logic of dreams their feathers would fall away before he ate them so that he tasted nothing but flesh. He awoke with the taste lingering and his mouth full of saliva. He remembered fragments of his dream and wondered if the juncos and titmice he threw seed and bread scraps to all winter long were playing into his subconscious. He thought: I may die in this hellhole. He cranked himself off the sofa, a red velour job he’d picked up on the cheap at the Goodwill store, went into the kitchen and, out of some masochistic whim, microwaved stale coffee. Shower, shave, work—another morning’s uninspiring routine beckoned. Being self-employed, so long out of harness from Cleveland homicide, had lost its joy. He knew he had to see a woman about her son. How his thirteen-year-old corpse had come to be sprawled across her kitchen floor with most of his brain matter excavated from his skull. Haftmann had an uneasy relationship with the Lake cops and their cranky chief. He was allowed him to poach on their territory from time to time as long as he remembered he was no longer a cop and was (he would say) merely mortal; some in the precinct would say much, much less than mortal. “Gumshoe” and “shamus” weren’t altogether passé as slang references to his private investigation career, but “window peeper” and “snoop” were more common among the Lake cops he encountered. Like the crow’s-feet around his one good eye or the gray spreading outward and spilling downward from his crown, he was aware that time was passing faster with each birthday. Unfortunately, he wasn’t growing a thicker skin with each passing season. His concern that life was shortening as he aged was borne out by science and by the fear that he would never have enough money to live decently in retirement because he intended to jettison his second career as soon as he was able to. Haftmann was forced to define “decently” as having sufficient beer money because he had re-acquired a bad habit from the early years of his marriage to a woman who had decided he was the particular baggage she needed to jettison in middle age. Haftmann, a self-styled existentialist, wasn’t comforted by physicists who say there might exist subatomic particles in the brain released after death and these alone comprise human consciousness. Bright lights, a tunnel, one’s kith and kin, not to mention a flaxen-haired Jesus pointing the way to the pearly gates was a construct of our culture, nothing more. The body’s last twitch, a gift to the dying, and a little squirt of endorphins to ease the way to death. Most of what he learned late in life annoyed him, in fact, so he resolved that, that when the time came for him to go into the great blackness of oblivion, he might as well go out as he had come into the world and remain as obtusely stupid to whatever new knowledge the smart ones might try to pour into his head. In my end is my beginning, he mused, thinking of his long-ago catechism days, and blew on the steaming coffee. He set about facing the day ahead. * * *

Jochem van der Steen Blogspot Review
Nocturne for Madness (New Pulp Press, 2016)

This was one hard to read novel. Not because of the writing, but the fact it was so dark and sometimes shocking I had to put it away. Haftmann is not the light-hearted hero like Spenser or Elvis Cole and the bad guy is not an amusing mobster like Joe Broz.

Ex-cop Haftmann is a drinker, a gambler and mentally unstable. He's also on the trail of a serial killer that kills women who he picks up from swinger sites. Working with, but still hated by the police and FBI we follow Haftmann's descent further into insanity on his hunt for the killer.

The writing is dark and lyrical, gruesome details are not spared at all. The atmosphere unsettling.
So, if you [think] that Andrew Vacchs writes too light-hearted and Spenser’s novels are too Disney for you, this is your book.

Posted by jvdsteen at 1:49 AM No comments:

Labels: Review, Robb White, Thomas Haftmann



Nocturne for Madness: hardboiled brilliance
In this, the first Thomas Haftmann book, we encounter the controlled madness of two men, one a former cop, the other a misfit and killer of women. Ex-homicide cop Thomas Haftmann is recently divorced and working as a PI. Barely surviving financially, and haunted by his own twin demons of gambling and alcohol, Haftmann gets swept up in the statewide manhunt for a killer who meets women on swingers’ websites. The murderer carries with him a voice in his head which grows stronger as his madness intensifies over the course of the year-long manhunt. And Haftmann’s own mental instability accelerates as he closes in on the killer…

There would appear to be a competition among crime writers to produce the most comfortably clichéd cop. You know the sort; difficult domestics, booze blues, world-weariness … and the inevitable redemption reveal, where our hero turns out to be misunderstood, to have a heart of gold and to spend his every waking hour dodging bullets, dodging booze and dodging brutality unbound so that he can help old ladies cross the street.

Thomas Haftmann is not like that. Not… exactly. In a crime writer competition to construct the most unlikeable hero, Thomas Haftmann wins. By a mile.

Robb White’s writing is simply superb — although better editing would help in places, as both continuity and syntax can bound around a little.

All the characters are finely drawn, and drawn with a sharp pencil, with excellent observation of the human head’n’heart. None of them is pure — purely good or purely bad — apart from the villain. That guy is stunningly scaring — consistently unpredictable and gratifyingly insane. Up there with Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, in fact.

The plot is good, the visuals exceptional and the dialogue romps along in the fine style. Everything a reader of the hard-boiled genre wants is here. I liked it so much that I bought the other two Haftmann novels, and am reading the next now. More please, Mr White.

Reviewed by Frank Westworth,
Murder, Mayhem & More