Customer Reviews

The Lady Kills

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Back in the 50s, Bruno Fischer (aka Russell Gray) turned out some fun femme fatale stories like So Wicked My Love and House of Flesh. The Lady Kills is a decent read, but not nearly as good or erotic as the other books I mentioned. The plot: A small town reporter falls for the publisher's daughter who turns out to be not as sweet as he thought. In fact, she makes a bad habit of murdering men. And she's tied up with the local crime syndicate the reporter is trying to expose. How long will he let his love blind him to the awful truth?

What drives me crazy is how craptastic publisher Blackmask is at reprinting these lost noir novels. The formatting is squished so tight that there are maybe one or two spaces indented to designate a new paragraph, and different characters' dialogue will get smashed into the same paragraph, so you have to guess who is talking. There are also at least one to a half-dozen typos per page in addition to the formatting errors. At one point, I caught three typos in the same sentence! Blackmask doesn't care about anything but cramming these books into as few pages as possible with zero attention to detail, right down to the tiny JPG cover art. All of their books are like this, more or less, some to the point of being unreadable (this one isn't unreadable, but it is loaded with errors). Don't ever buy a Blackmask edition of anything unless you can't find it anywhere else or for a decent price.