Simone Kirsch always wanted to join the police force. She's smart, fit and wants to do good. But she has a problem. She has worked as a stripper for the last three years and the service won't let her in. She enrolls in an investigator course at a security college and tops her class. It even looks like she might have some surveillance work coming up. It's all going to plan. But then her best friend Chloe-a fellow stripper who works at Melbourne's notorious The Red Room-is kidnapped after its owner is murdered and Simone has two weeks to find the culprit and save Chloe's life. PEEPSHOW is sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, a wild ride that takes you inside Melbourne's adult cinemas and lap dancing clubs. Simone is a sexy, sassy Tart-Noir heroine. Kind of like Karen Sisco, but with open leg work.
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From Publishers Weekly
Australian author Redhead puts her past as a stripper and table dancer to effective use in her debut, the first in a crime series to feature aspiring PI Simone Kirsch. Simone, who performs in peep shows and as a striptease dancer to support herself, gets her first break after Frank Parisi—a thug who ran a strip club called the Red Room in St. Kilda, a Melbourne suburb—is brutally hacked to death before being dumped in the bay. Frank's brother suspects Simone's best friend, Chloe, who worked for the dead man, ordered the murder. Simone, who manages to buy some time by offering to identify the real killer, gets a job at the Red Room and starts to pump the other dancers for information. Soon, she's involved with several men, one a police officer whose boss is notorious for being both dirty and violent. Readers should be prepared for some graphic sex scenes, which fit naturally into the action, given the heroine's line of work. Redhead has made an unlikely premise convincing. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Simone Kirsch -- Stripper/Detective,
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This review is from: Peepshow (Paperback)
Peepshow (Outfit Crime, 2009) is the first novel by Australian writer Leigh Redhead, and yes, that is her real name. It is the first of three novels featuring Detective/Stripper Simone Kirsch. Simone originally wanted to become a police officer, but her history of working in the sex industry saw her bumped from consideration, so she chose the next best thing: a private investigator's license.
Her PI career takes off with a boom when the owner of a local strip joint is murdered and Simone's best friend Chloe, a dancer at the club, is kidnapped. Simone makes a deal with the kidnappers; if she can find the real killer in two weeks, Chloe will be spared. Her investigation takes her in and out of rock clubs, strip clubs, fetish clubs, and onto the floor of a sex industry conference. Meanwhile she's dodging wise guys and crooked police, all while still having to earn enough of a living to make her rent. Based on Ms. Redhead's true life biography, it is clear she is drawing from much personal experience in depicting the scenes of this book, and it shows in the level of detail. The story has strippers, sex, drugs, and rock n . . . er, mostly country music. And that's one of the things I loved about it! The fact that this book, by an Australian writer, references so much of the country music from my collection (Steve Earle, Vanessa Williams, Johnny Cash, et al) made it damn fun. And a scene toward the end where all these dive bar/strip club dwellers convene at an outside barbecue in broad daylight and how odd they look, to Simone, out of their element -- classic! It reminded me of the summer I helped my wife build a straw bale house in Tucson, AZ. The day of the wall raising -- when a couple truckloads of straw bales had to be stacked up in a shape resembling a dwelling -- several of her friends from the Tucson music community showed up dressed as they would for a night on the town. Redhead's description of her literary BBQ harkened back to this event from my own life so perfectly that I was grinning ear to ear. The book is fast-paced, and if there are maybe a few too many coincidences moving the plot here and there, they are to be forgiven because the story is such a rollicking good time with so many memorable characters. Simone is an excellent lead and fun to spend time with. I enjoyed the Aussie slang employed throughout, and also liked to see the inner workings of the world of peep shows and strip clubs. There are at least two more Simone Kirsch crime novels, and I'm hoping that The Outfit sees fit to reissue them as well.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sexy Funny Private Eye,
By
This review is from: Peepshow (Paperback)
This is a wonderful sassy crime romp from a very witty local Melbourne writer. She knows her genre well and she has a clear affection for the seedier side of her city and its lowlifes - you can almost smell the sour, VB soaked beermats and taste the bitter tang of the cask wine. This series is a brilliant mixture of humour, sass and hard-boiled p.i action and much better than the Janet Evanovich series to which it is often compared. It has a much more faceted main character in Simone Kirsch than the annoyingly one-dimensional Stephanie Plum and they achieve a real sense of danger. Redhead also slyly delivers a shrewd comment on contemporary sexual manners and hypocrisy while never losing her sense of humor.
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