Every Last Drop: A Novel [Paperback]

Charlie Huston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2008

“[Charlie Huston’s] action scenes are unparalleled in crime fiction and his dialogue is so hip and dead-on that Elmore Leonard should be getting nervous.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review), on Half the Blood of Brooklyn

It’s like this: a series of bullet-riddled bad breaks has seen rogue Vampyre and terminal tough guy Joe Pitt go from PI for hire to Clan-connected enforcer to dead man walking in a New York minute. And after burning all his bridges, the only one left to cross leads to the Bronx, where Joe’s brass knuckles and straight razor can’t keep him from running afoul of a sadistic old bloodsucker with a bad bark and a worse bite. Even if every Clan in Manhattan is hollering for Joe’s head on a stick, it’s got to be better than trying to survive in the outer-borough wilderness.

So it’s a no-brainer when Clan boss Dexter Predo comes looking to make a deal. All Joe has to do to win back breathing privileges on his old turf is infiltrate an upstart Clan whose plan to cure the Vyrus could expose the secret Vampyre world to mortal eyes and set off a panic-driven massacre. Not cool. But Joe’s all over it. To save the Undead future, he just has to wade neck-deep through all the archenemies, former friends, and assorted heavy hitters he’s crossed in the past. No sweat? Maybe not, but definitely more blood than he’s ever seen or hungered for. And maybe even some tears–over the horror and heartbreaking truth about the evil men do no matter who or what they are.

Praise for Charlie Huston and his Joe Pitt novels

“In conceiving his world (a New York City divided by vampire clans, each with different reasons to hate Pitt), Huston gives a fading genre a fresh afterlife. [Grade:] A.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“[Huston] creates a world that is at once supernatural and totally familiar, imaginative, and utterly convincing.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this fascinatingly flawed fourth episode in the bloody horror-noir chronicles of New York vampire PI Joe Pitt (after 2007's Half the Blood Of Brooklyn), relations between the city's vampire clans are unraveling. The Cure is researching antidotes to the ravenous vampire-creating Vyrus, while the better-nourished Coalition seeks the Cure's downfall and the Society plays both sides. Dodging death threats and brokering shaky deals, Pitt shuttles among all three until he learns the Coalition's secret, a revelation so volatile that it may lead to all-out war. Huston supplies terse dialogue and convincing gore in expertly pitched prose, but the beautifully cinematic nastiness doesn't quite mask a key difficulty: Pitt's enemies set their hate aside too easily at his appearance, and their rational behavior is at odds with the emotional intensity (and sheer implausibility) of the climax. Newcomers may find the relationships difficult to parse, but those familiar with the series should be enthralled. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

In his fourth outing, rakish New York vampire Joe Pitt leaves the series’ “casebooks” nomenclature in the dust. This toothsome tale is no variation on the P.I. genre; instead, Huston imaginatively, logically explores the limits of the world he’s created for Pitt to haunt. If a virus that forced its hosts to seek blood for sustenance gave rise to competing secret clans that kept members fed in exchange for allegiance, wouldn’t a rising population of infected require development of a secure supply chain lest the drained bodies of victims started piling up on the Manhattan streets? Wouldn’t a threat to that supply destabilize the entire clan structure? And how would the established clans react to an upstart group promising to find a cure—thus stripping the old guard of its power? The answers to these questions might pierce even Pitt’s leather-tough heart as he takes readers on another darkly entertaining ride. Meanwhile, his nights of acting as unofficial clan go-between might be drawing to a close as the saber-rattling and brinksmanship escalates toward an all-out vampire war. We can hardly wait. --Frank Sennett

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey (September 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345495888
• ISBN-13: 978-0345495884
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #190,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charlie Huston is the author of the bestsellers The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and The Shotgun Rule, as well as the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and several titles for Marvel Comics. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Sanguinary Experience, October 21, 2008

By 

Colin P. Lindsey (Manchester, NH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Every Last Drop: A Novel (Paperback)

Let me first say that I love the works of Charlie Huston. All of his books I have read until now have been five star, rock-n-roll, pull-no-punches, burn the barn down, extraordinary works. His Caught Stealing: A Novel trilogy is one of my favorite series, and his Joe Pitt vampire stories, of which this is the fourth, are howlingly good. Yet I had a reservation about this latest book which I'll explain in just a sec.

For those of you running across this series for the first time, do yourself a favor and get the first book in this series, Already Dead: A Novel, and start reading from the beginning. This is a darkly lyrical, powerfully told story of vampires in NYC, but unlike any vampire story you've read before. In Huston's world, vampires mostly lead lives of quiet desperation, drink whiskeys with a beer back, smoke cheap cigarettes, scrabble to pay the rent, and have to contend with a dangerous addiction to blood. Gotta have it, or you will die. However, you just can't start knocking people off or the boys in blue will catch wise and then it's genocide for vampires time. To protect their existence, the vampires have formed into clans who divide up Manhattan and police themselves ruthlessly and contend with other clans much like rival gangs. Huston's vampires are not romantic figures nor are they any more horrific than humans. They were once ordinary people struggling to get by and now they're the same people, with a need for blood, struggling to get by. The protagonist, Joe Pitt, is a big tough guy, living without clan membership, struggling to get by in the cracks of vampire and human society, working gigs as a bouncer or sometimes doing investigative jobs for some of the vampire clans. Huston's works are filled with many memorable characters just as real life is. There are transvestite, hippie, financial mafia, and gay and lesbian rights vampires in these noirish tales with more to do with crime fiction than horror.

For those of you who have read the first three books and are just checking the reviews of this one before purchasing, c'mon, who are you kidding? You're going to buy this book and read it regardless of what anyone says here because you already know this series is more addictive than blood. In this fourth installment, Joe is living in the hinterlands of the Bronx and not enjoying himself so much when he is captured and mutilated by an old enemy. "Rescued" by Predo, another old enemy and ordered back to Manhattan to spy on old friends. The story is engaging, violent, noirish and fun, just like the first three tales. The story rockets forward with Joe, ever the spoiler, precipitating what looks like will be an all out war between the Society, the Coalition, the Enclave, and The Cure (a brand new vampire clan). And there the story stops, which is my peeve with this book. We are left hanging with no resolution of the big conflict set up in the first 250 pages. Huston has always written brilliant tales that you leave with a satisfying conclusion to the crises created in the novel, even if there is always room to create another crisis for the next novel. He doesn't do that here, and this book feels like the first half of a book as opposed to a whole book in and of itself, and I was disappointed that the story just stopped with no resolution. I didn't like being set up for fireworks and then finding I will have to wait I don't know how many months for a resolution. So while this is a great story, it is only half the story. Therefore I am awarding four stars for the first time to a Huston novel. Normally I would counsel people to grab Huston's books as fast as they can get their hands on them, but this time my advice is to wait to read this one until the next one comes out and them read them together. Then again, I've never been one for delayed gratification, so if you don't mind half now, then half later, go ahead, this is still the darkly enjoyable Pitt series in fine form.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joe Pitt Strkes Back, October 13, 2008

By 

Patrick John Murray (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Every Last Drop: A Novel (Paperback)

Just a warning, this will not be a spoiler-free review.

In Charlie Huston's fourth Joe Pitt novel, the tension rises as protagonist Joe Pitt returns from exile to exact revenge and, once again, play all sides against one another to get what he wants. From dealing with savage, african inspired savages, digging up old skeletons from his past across the river, to uncovering a secret so large, it could potentially destroy life altogether for those that carry the vyrus. Not to mention the long awaited rendezvous...

Being a reader since the first title (Already Dead) I couldn't wait for this book to drop, but was also slightly worried. After all, Huston's last three had been knock outs, could he capitalize on the universe he had built??

The answer, which comes as no surprise, is yes. Every Last Drop is just as gory, engrossing, and fast paced as the rest of the series has been. I literally couldn't put this book down until the very end. I anxiously wait the conclusion to this five-part masterpiece.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The New "Vein" of Pulp Style, October 11, 2008

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Every Last Drop: A Novel (Paperback)

Take the unlikely combination of Elmore Leonard and Bram Stoker and you get Charlie Huston and Joe Pitt, Huston's vampire-heavy who prowls the streets of New York City's boroughs in "Every Last Drop", the fourth installment of the most hip, irreverent, and darkly innovative crime fiction to hit the shelves since Raymond Chandler.

In this go around, after burning bridges with all the undead folks who matter in the various tribes of Manhattan, Pitt is exiled to the wild and unaffiliated wastelands of the Bronx and Queens, where untamed vampire gangs stalk home-bound Yankees fans, their blatant feedings threatening to expose the undead's existence to the world at large. Pitt's misfortune puts him in the hands of the abominable "Lament", an ancient and nefarious villain who corrupts and runs bands of vampire youth in the Bronx, to be rescued - in a fashion - by his old nemesis, Dexter Predo of the upscale "Coalition" clan. Predo tasks Pitt with penetrating the upstart "Cure", headed by the brilliant and uninfected Amanda Horde, the young debutante rescued by Pitt in the first installment of this off-the-wall series. But Pitt has his own agenda - getting back to his familiar streets of Manhattan, and finding the fate of girlfriend Evie left in the "care" of the frighteningly surreal "Enclave" at the conclusion of "Half the Blood in Brooklyn." Before this one wraps up, Pitt has discovered a horror unspeakable evil, evil even as defined within the context of this Tolkien-like nightmare world of vampire clans co-existing peacefully - well, mostly peacefully - with New York's straight citizens. Pitt's discovery leaves the clans are on the verge of war, and Pitt with a few less pieces than when he started all the fun.

OK, so in reading this review, if you're not familiar with Huston's Joe Pitt, you are probably thinking "what the Hell is this idiot talking about?" And indeed, "Every Last Drop" is definitely NOT the place to start this provocative and insightful series that parodies not only the obvious horror fare, but also a wide diversity of topics from social progressiveness to Wall Street greed. The transformation of the series is fascinating - from the blood-heavy "Already Dead", entrenched in vampire lore, to this one, in which the whole vampire-shtick is almost incidental to a story that is far, far more pulp crime fiction than it is horror. As always, Huston's distain for convention in both theme and structure results in a style as distinctive as Cormac McCarthy - trademark prose that Huston can claim indisputably as his own.

This is pop fiction at its creative peak - fresh and satirical and stuffed full of allegory and nuance - an in-your-face slap at convention and protocol that will most certainly launch a pack of new stylists in its wake. While Huston's blunt violence and his sparse, unapologetic passages are not for anyone, the iconoclastic Huston will continue to hold down my number one spot of contemporary crime writers.