Customer Reviews

The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club (A Martin Zolotow Mystery)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
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This first novel for Brian A. Hopkins features one Martin Zolotow, a rough hewn, ex-cop with a soft spot for well-turned ankles and a hard fist for nasty, bad guys. He's puppy-dog lovable and wild-animal rugged all in the same breath.

The story opens with Zolotow ("Zolo" to his friends and the ladies) painfully parting with his current lover, a young hooker he's taken off the streets, loved, and is putting on a plane that will send her back to an innocent life with her family. What he finds out immediately after her departure is that some rather creepy bad-guys are waiting to abscond him and whisk him away to... Oklahoma City!

Once in the Sooner state, Zolo's taken to a secluded stronghold somewhere in the OK panhandle, but not before he's recruited to rescue the daughter of a major crime figure. His incentive (besides just staying alive) is the young woman he had just put on the plane. He fails; she dies.

Put through his paces in this wild, action-packed adventure, Zolo battles both the members of the Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club (they're originally from Ohio and not native Oklahoman bad blood) and his own muddled memory, an affliction that is at once his Achilles heel and a strange endearing quality. He's beaten with a ball bat, dragged through cow manure, chased, and shot at, but never totally thwarted because the poetry-spouting detective's acerbic wit and undaunting sense of what's right makes him too driven to stay down. Oh, and also some very lovely women come to his aid.

Mix in a snarling dog, a gaunt bad-guy in a wheelchair, some women who can handle both being sexy in bubble baths and in employing martial arts kicks--oh, and vampires!--and the action is non-stop!

Hopkins takes the reader on a wild romp with sure ease in his knowledge of weapons, chemistry, and women. Yet it's Zolo's revealing himself as kindhearted as Joe R. Lansdale's Hap Collins (and just as unlucky!) and as blindly chivalrous as John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee that make Zolo a whole new breed of hero, the kind who would attack a windmill on a seatless motorcycle in a tiger print bikini brief to save a lady! But that's another adventure all together.

Take a sarcastic private detective, add in rednecks from Oklahoma, genetically engineered vampires and enough action for three John Woo movies and you've got a killer debut novel. Hopkins delivers and he's got a bright future ahead of him. Get in on the ground floor and hang on for a wild and fun ride.

A private investigator novel at it's heart, this fabulous book crosses over into so many other genres, in such entertaining, insightful, creative, clever, and wickedly witty ways, I was having cerebral orgasms as I whipped through the pages, breathlessly awaiting the next fabulous development, which is rarely more than a page or two away. When this much fun is packed into so tight a package, there should be a warning label about the potential for the volatile mixture to explode in your brain, a situation which could lead to a permanent, one-way trip to a multi-faceted-consciousness that will never let you see the world in the tired old way in which you're accustomed to seeing it, again. If you don't want to risk this kind of mind-expanding literary experience, you're browsing in the wrong isle. But give it a try, anyway, no one has ever been sorry to take a path like this before, and you can believe me, because I never lie, and I'm always right. No brag, just fact.

There is a long standing tradition joining Detective stories with the supernatural or involving a science fiction twist. Clive Barker, Phillip K. Dick and Arthur Conan Doyle have dipped their literary toes into this particular pool with fantastic results. Brian Hopkins has added another quality, fast paced volume to the sub-genre with The Licking Valley Coon Hunter's Club.

The hero, Martin Zolotow, joins his predecessors with a few interesting twists of his own. He suffers from a unique malady that can cause bouts of memory loss. It's not the focal point of the story, as is Leonard's little memory quirk in Momento, but it does provide an interesting trait to the character. This little complication explains how his mind is able to make some bizarre connections between pieces of evidence and gives him an excuse to pepper in bits of obscure literary references, poetry and Shakespeare. (Zolotowmemorized bits of prose to train his recollection as a child).

Unfortunately, this same interesting quirk also serves the authors inclusion of several distracting flashbacks of the hero in therapy with the one woman that he seems unattracted to. While these vignettes from his recent past are interesting and do add quite a lot to Zolotow's depth of character, the structure removes the reader from the action and breaks the pace of the story. I wouldn't want to see them removed so much as condensed and possibly included as a prologue or serving as the opening chapter. This however, is the one minor misstep in an otherwise cracking good novel.

The pace is incredibly fast and the action virtually nonstop. The villains are properly menacing and sinister with loads of interesting little eccentricities of their own. Not only that, but there were plenty of them. Every character, save our hero, a misplaced grad-student and a group of kidnapped prostitutes, wears a figurative black hat. Zolotow was really up against the wall in this one.

Licking Valley is a nice, quick read that will leave you wanting more. Hopefully the subtitle- "A Martin Zolotow Mystery" is indicative of the fact that there will be more adventures of my favorite, brain damaged detective forthcoming.

I've been a fan of Brian A. Hopkins's short fiction for years. He has a way of bringing the reader into the depths of a character's mind and soul, whether they want to be there or not. I find myself being dropped into his stories, rather than simply reading them. You don't even know it's happening until you're done, and exhausted. It's a sure sign of a smooth and confident writing style. However, picking up Brian's first full-length novel, I didn't know what to expect. I mean, with a title like The Licking Valley Coon Hunter's Club, I had to assume it was going to be a LITTLE lighter than his usual fare. My assumption was correct, but the crisp writing, the feeling that you, as the reader, are in the story rather than simply an outsider, is there as much as ever.

Without rehashing the plot as earlier reviews have done, I WILL say that this book starts with a bang, grabs you by the hair and drags you along on one of the most bizarre and wild adventures I've read in a long time. I was bruised and bullied as badly as Mr. Zolotow, and loved every minute of it. I found myself hoping the author would keep up the break-neck pace until the end, like a kid on a carnival ride not wanting it to ever stop. He didn't disappoint. We occasionally leap into the past, to a quiet interplay between Martin and a police psychiatrist, and the subtle mind games each play against the other, but we're in these moments only long enough to catch our breath, when the ride starts up again.

Is this a horror novel? Well, sort of. I'd be more likely to classify it as an action/mystery story. Take the fun of a Grafton, the action and violence of Block, a likeable main character as you might find in a Hillerman novel, put them together with the voice and style of one of the best new writers out there today, and you've got an eclectic, fast-paced, sometimes-nasty but always-fun read.

If wise guy, smart mouthed private detectives get on your nerves, if you are revolted by the possibility of having to read one more of Parker's Spencer novels, then this recent tidbit from Brian Hopkins might be just what you need. The investigator in question is Martin Zolotow. Retired from the police due to the excessive death rate that seems to follow him around, Zolotow now alternates between working for hire and rescuing young women from lives of sin on the street. He perceives of himself as a white knight, defending the innocent while quoting Rosetti. The rest of the world, however, seems to disagree with him.

In this tale Zolotow is literally kidnapped into helping rescue the daughter of Tobias Weatherford Washington, an Oklahoman crime boss. She has been kidnapped by another equally unpleasant Oklahoman, James McDevitt, who mixes the manufacture and sale of designer drugs with genetic experiments that turn humans into vampires. McDevitt has discovered that young black women are the perfect vampire snack, so Rayleen Washington is at considerable risk. Martin quickly discovers that his work is cut out for him. He finds Rayleen, but is captured himself, and eventually winds up one of the prey in a vampiric cattle drive.

What makes "The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club" remarkable it the amount of gratuitous and headlong violence it contains. Almost all of it is aimed at Zolotow. By page 20 he has already received two vicious beatings, and the bloodshed continues through the remaining 152. If you carefully tally up the injuries Martin receives in the 48 hour course of the book, one can only conclude that he has special powers of his own. Unfortunately none of those talents include knowing when to step out of the line of fire. Zolotow likes to irritate his opponents, and often gets what he deserves.

I don't want to give the impression this is a badly written book. I'm inclined to think of it as a sort of noir bodice ripper for the macho set. There's lots of rescuing damsels, lots of attacking the bad guys, and not a whole lot of plot to confuse things. In a short novel with this much action it would be too much to expect fine characterization. Instead, Hopkins relies on archetypes to populate his tale (the huge fat bad guy, the prostitute with the heart of gold, etc.). Even Zolotow does a fair amount of posturing in a set of short flashbacks that are intended to help us understand him. It took me a bit to adjust, but in the long run I found the book enjoyable, if somewhat hard to believe.

Marc Ruby already did a bang-up job of reviewing this book but I thought I'd throw my two cents in anyway because I want to add a recommendation. I was reviewing Stoker award winners the other day looking for excellent reads I might have overlooked and this one popped out at me. Any book with a title like this kinds of grabs your attention in a "what-the-heck?" kind of way. I had to order an old copy which was pretty expensive. I'm not sure I'd recommend shelling out twenty bucks for this book as it is a pretty stripped down novel; more novella actually. It's certainly not cluttered with much character development or plot. It's also not a horror novel even though it features "vampires". Nevertheless I did enjoy reading it even if I don't think it merited a Stoker.

The author wrote this as a serialization over email in the late nineties and obviously had some fun doing it. It's a straight up story, straight like a baseball bat, featuring Martin Zolotow, an LA detective, ex-cop, and reasonably tough guy, kidnapped by an Oklahoma drug kingpin and sent across the state to rescue his daughter from an even crazier drug lord, Jim McDevitt. McDevitt raises hogs, and like most hog-farming drug dealers, also maintains a biochemistry lab where his pet mad scientists are experimenting with telomerase in an effort to extend human life. These experiments somehow end up making McDevitt and his gang into "vampires" insofar as their increased longevity comes with the requirement of imbibing human blood, with the blood of young black females being the preferred variety for it's enhanced telomerase. The science presented isn't too involved but that would have only got in the way of a relentless 170 pages of Zolotow getting viciously beat upon by almost everyone he meets. He gamefully dishes some back out, but he certainly seems to get the worst of it through most of the story. If you like action-oriented fiction, don't need any plot or characterization, and are in the mood for a good beating scene or three then this is a jim-dandy read. I enjoyed reading it because I like a good tough guy story as much as anyone and it was kind of refreshing to have the protagonist take more of a pounding than what he gives out. Zolotow is your guy if you admire a fellow who can take his beatings and still keep on ticking.

My conclusion? This is a great macho, tough guy vs tough guy, bruise-fest and if you can find an inexpensive copy I'd recommend it as a few hours of fun. However, if you want some really, really good tough guy fiction, with intricate plot, great characterization, interesting stories, surprise hair-pin twists, and unbelievable ratcheting tension check out Charlie Huston. He has four books out that are incredibly good and a sweet, sweet read.

Brian A Hopkins has outdone himself! This story involving out favorite PI Martin Zolotow has it all! If you want a love story, this is it, if you want vampires, this is it, if you want a boring, dull, uninteresting story of a PI looking for baddies...this is NOT it! BAH does not hold anything back. It is hard to briefly describe a BAH story, and this story is no exception. There are damsels in distress, a hero who always get the snot beat out of him (but, does that stop him? NOOOOO!), and even vampires. The action is non-stop, and down and dirty, with just enough love interest to keep it interesting! This is my favorite Zolotow story. Ice Castles (BAHs MUCH anticipated follow-up to Cold At Heart) should only further cement BAH as one of this century's top science fiction writers!

Brian A. Hopkin's short novel, "THE LICKING VALLEY COON HUNTERS CLUB" (Yard Dog Press, 2000), enjoys the distinction of having been nominated for the Stoker award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. Having said that, and having enjoyed previous work by the author, I'm forced to admit to some measure of disappointment in this particular novel. LICKING VALLEY reintroduces the reader to the dysfunctional private detective, Martin Zolotow, previously featured in a series of stories co-written with David Niall Wilson (including the superior "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," 1995). The present novel, which pits the protagonist against what might be loosely termed a gang of redneck, genetically-engineered vampires, does have a bit to recommend it, but (in my opinion) it ultimately founders under the weight of a number of problems. First, the pace of the novel is so break-neck that Hopkins has decided to reveal bits and pieces of Martin's bruised psyche through the slightly clumsy artifice of occasional flashbacks in which he verbally spars with a police psychologist. Second, Hopkins adopts a literary stratagem that always makes my skin crawl: At various points in the narrative Zolotow quotes or paraphrases lines from well-known literary works. To my mind this is almost always a transparently cheap attempt to appear erudite. Third, too many of the characters appear as cartoonish sterotypes (e.g., the aforementioned psychologist; a young biogeneticist who, like too many scientists that inhabit the world of fiction, is a whiz-kid in the laboratory, but just doesn't understand women; and -- to a certain extent -- Zolotow himself, yet another tough-but-tender-hearted P.I.). LICKING VALLEY isn't a bad effort, but I expected better.

I read this novel chapter by chapter, as it was being written. Was it 1997 - 98? The author was kind enough to allow many of his Literatzi cohorts the privilege of taking the journey with him as he unfurled his brain onto the page. It wasn't precisely my cup of tea when it comes to fiction, but extraordinarily well done within the genre. Well done Brian! Bravo!!