Spider Moon

Two things were meaningful to Slim Purdoux, his son and his chance to cultivate good books as an editor. The world took his son from him and "market realities" took the other. Now he's on a mission. A mission to get the dealer who sold his kid the drugs that took his life. But this ain't the kinda mission where saints guide you. For this kind of task you need the likes of Wendell, a pimp and a player who is always one step ahead of something, and his crew – Red, a French Canadian small-time crook, and Latesha and Dulcet, his girls. Purdoux – an ex-addict and inmate, street-savvy and gun-wise – picks them up in his doomed cowboy existentialist slipstream and draws them into his scheme. Not that Wendell's in this game on any frigging mission of vengeance for angry daddies, he's in it to score the big bucks that have always been just beyond his grasp – and this cowboy won't be standing in his way.

Careening at break-neck speed around corners of San Francisco where angels would fear to tread, Spider Moon places its characters and the reader on the razor's edge of reality. Shirley mixes a lunatic gunman, a mission of vengeance, pimps, whores, chasing the dragon, bounty hunters, dealers, and more with his unique perspective, talent and style to invent a new kind of crime novel: gritty, real, wild, and heart-breakingly poignant.