American Static
by Tom Pitts
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Pub Date Jun 26 2017 | Archive Date Jun 05 2018
Description
After being beaten and left for dead, Steven finds himself stranded alongside the 101 in a small Northern California town. When a mysterious stranger named Quinn offers a hand in exchange for help reuniting with his daughter in San Francisco, Steven gets in the car and begins a journey from which there is no return.
Quinn has an agenda all his own and he's unleashing vengeance at each stop along his path. With a coked-up sadist ex-cop chasing Quinn, and two mismatched small town cops chasing the ex-cop, Steven is unaware of the violent tempest brewing.
Corrupt cops and death-dealing gangsters manipulate the maze each of them must navigate to get to the one thing they're all after: Teresa, the girl holding the secret that will rip open a decades-old scandal and scorch San Francisco's City Hall.
Steven finds Teresa homeless and strung out as their pursuers close in and bodies begin to pile high on the Bay Area's back streets. Hand in hand Steven and Teresa lead the mad parade of desperate men to the edge of the void.
American Static is a fast paced crime thriller with a mystery woven in. It's played out against the backdrop of Northern California's wine country, Oakland's mean streets, and San Francisco's peaks and alleys, written by one of its favorite sons, a man who knows the underbelly of the city like no one else. American Static's prose has been compared to Elmore Leonard, Richard Price, and Don Winslow.
Advance Praise
"An absorbing and highly charged story of violent payback with considerable collateral damage."
—Kirkus Reviews
"American Static is an exciting rush of a book, and the sense of menace it creates from its mix of damaged people is constant and palpable."
—Criminal Element
“Tom Pitts has been writing about life on San Francisco’s avenues for a while. Hustle, republished in 2016, is particularly good. American Static is a welcome return. There are a handful of American authors pushing the boundaries of noir crime including Joe Clifford (recently nominated for an Edgar), Les Edgerton and Tom Pitts, along with the publisher of this novel, Down and Out Books. All producing edgy, dark and gritty material. Street level stuff with a hard edge.
American Static is initially a slow burn tale. There’s clearly something very wrong with Quinn. In fact everyone seemingly has something to hide in American Static. Only Steven is an innocent… well, apart from being a drug trafficker. When Quinn’s murderous intent becomes clear, what follows is a cleverly constructed cat and mouse trawl around the seedier parts of San Francisco, with Teresa the prize. Pitts slowly parcels out the revelations until a hugely satisfying conclusion.
The characters are all really well drawn, the utterly sociopathic Quinn being the best. San Francisco and its grimy undertone make for an excellent backdrop against which the story plays. A really great novel which fans of this particular genre should lap up.”
—Crime Fiction Lover
Available Editions
EDITION | Paperback |
ISBN | 9781943402847 |
PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
Links
Featured Reviews
American Static sizzles. It's easily the best crime novel of the year for me, and I read a lot. We see two cops, one retired, from Northern California take a ride to San Francisco to ferret out a witness who had absconded. There was so much in store for them that a summary would hardly do. But the ride they take becomes the ride of their lives as their absconded witness turns out to be a serial killer with the inside goods on corruption in San Francisco. Author Tom Pitts plays the cards perfectly. No cheap stunts, no exaggerated italics to make you feel excited. He doesn't need those tricks, he has the real goods This novel is authentic, believable, gutsy, and all out exciting. I don't rave like this as a matter of course. I liked this book!
Thanks NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. I hope you have a best seller on your hands.
This book was fantastic! I've added the author to my read list. (5) star review on Amazon.
This thriller has everything: murder, corruption, drugs, a heroin-addled femme fatale...all set in San Francisco, which of course means frantic chase scenes as well. When Steven gets involved with Quinn he has no idea what he is in for as Quinn proves to be a ruthless, cold-blooded killer who will stop at nothing to find his daughter, Theresa. Cops on his trail, the two battle both good guys and bad guys, all the while uncovering a mystery that ties everything together. Fast-paced and often humorous, this novel moves at warp speed so beware!
Very nice book, filled with violent revenge plots, and a couple of kids trying to find their way. Liked the book alot, almost five stars for me, but just fell a little short in the character development part for me. had a couple characters that i just needed a little more from to really push it to five stars. But a very enjoyable novel that was a ton of fun to read. Just would have liked to get to know the characters just a little more.
This is the first book I have read by Tom Pitts. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. While some parts of it were a little predictable, there were still many twists that kept me reading till the end. The characters were perfectly depicted. There was a lot of action without going into a lot of background descriptions, which I find boring in a book. I would definitely recommend this book for mystery/thriller book fans.
American Static is a pounding shuddering racecar careening ahead into the night. It is a modern crime fiction story that is written so smoothly it draws the reader in, encircles the reader like a python that won't let go - that is, until you finish the book.. The writing style is fairly light and easy at first, sort of hiding the grittiness and the violence that erupts.
It starts with the classic pulp theme of a young innocent unwittingly used as a pawn, a shell, a sucker - and, yes, there's one born every minute. And then echoes so many other classic novels with a race against time with the bad guys and the law on a collision course. But there's more than that because there's so many different threads being pullled apart and no one can trust anyone else in a world of shifting loyalties and double crosses.
Just an all-around terrific crime thriller filled with killers, drug-addled runaways, secrets, desperation, and more. But -and here's what's most important - this writer tells a damn good story.