The Barnes & Noble Review
Edgar Award–winning author Joe R. Lansdale brings back the wild team of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine (featured in his classic novels Rumble Tumble, Bad Chili, and Mucho Mojo), for another gritty, gutsy, action-packed adventure. Whoever said that no good deed goes unpunished must have met these two East Texas bad ol' boys on one of their better days. Working security for a chicken-processing plant pretty much guaranteed a quiet life, until Hap heard a faint cry for help from just beyond the fence and charged to the rescue of a girl in the clutches of a brutal, drug-crazed attacker. He didn't expect any reward for his knee-jerk gallantry, but the girl's father (who happened to own the chicken plant) insisted on giving him a big check and offered him and Leonard a month-long vacation to boot. Only Hap and Leonard could turn a windfall like that into a disaster…and still come out on top. On paper, the cut-rate cruise they booked had all the amenities, but in fact, the food was lousy, the entertainment was worse, and travelling the high seas on the Sea Pleasure, a former Argentine navy boat, was anything but pleasant. It was almost a relief when the boat left without them after their first landfall. Then they were jumped by muggers, rescued by a feisty fisherman with a sexy daughter, and got tangled up with mobsters, murder, and mayhem south of the border…. Sue Stone

Best buddies Hap Collins and Leonard Pine get into trouble more often during the course of this book than most characters could manage in an entire series. These East Texas rowdies are working as security guards for a chicken-processing plant—which makes for several almost-funny chicken jokes—when Hap saves the life of a young woman who turns out to be the plant owner's daughter. Hap is rewarded for his heroics with a large check and a Caribbean cruise, which he takes with his friend Leonard. The two are quickly abandoned by the cruise ship in a small port, mugged by off-duty cops and saved by an old fisherman who is a whiz with a machete—all this before becoming ensnared in an elaborate, sometimes improbable, plot involving murder and revenge. What makes this duo unusual is that Hap is a white heterosexual and Leonard is a black homosexual. So along with the chicken humor you also get a handful of black-white, gay-straight jokes. Lansdale's last book, The Bottoms, won the prestigious Edgar Award, but if you've never picked up his other books, you'll probably scratch your head while reading this one and wonder what the fuss is about.
—Randy Michael Signor

Hap Collins is working as a security guard for a poultry plant when he saves a young woman from a brutal assault only to find that she is the daughter of the plant’s owner. As a reward the owner gives Hap $100,000, enough for Hap and his best friend Leonard Pine to take a vacation cruise down old Mexico way. However, when they become involved with an elderly fisherman and his beautiful daughter, they bring a world of trouble down on their heads. Lansdale’s writing is blunt, sometimes crude, and no holds barred violent, but it’s also witty, outrageously funny, and often touching. Phil Gigante’s delivery brings a sitting-at-the-bar intimacy to the book’s first-person narrative, and his delivery of the laugh-out-loud dialogue is worth the price of admission. A Vintage paperback. (Nov.)

Walking an East Texas poultry plant as a security guard isn't the stuff of joie de vivre, and for some time Hap Collins has been experiencing a pervasive and debilitating lassitude. Life is tasteless until fate takes a turn in Hap's life when he's in the right place to save a young girl from being beaten to death, earning the gratitude of her rich father. He also earns for himself and his faithful sidekick Leonard Pine (Freezer Burn, 1999, etc.) what's billed as a Caribbean pleasure cruise. Alas, before the ship ever reaches the Caribbean, Leonard makes an enemy of an officious steward who thereupon arranges to have them both stranded in Mexico, where Leonard is beaten up and stabbed, and Hap becomes involved with a Mexican beauty of questionable character, a relationship leading to others ranging from dubious to deplorable. Somehow they manage to get out of Mexico alive, but just barely, and not permanently. When a close friend of Hap's is mistaken for him and brutally murdered, he and Leonard return south of the border once more, heading a small vigilante party intent on hunting down the venomous gangster-murderer headquartered there, with one object in mind: violent and bloody payback. Lansdale, winner of last year's best-novel Edgar for The Bottoms, which gave Collins and Pine some time off, has certainly written more engrossing tales for his picaresque pair. Still, the trademark raunchiness is present in full measure, and even those fans who aren't caught up in this adventure will probably find themselves grinning a lot.