The Incredible Double

Description

Clay Backburn has two jobs. A bi-sexual book scout and a private detective. He doesn't have a license, a gun or business card - but he's in demand and never far from trouble. Clay fights his way through academic loons and CEO thugs on his way to understanding the secret of the Double. In this follow-up to The Chandler Apartments, Hill brings back the trusty sidekicks: Marvin, best friend and lefty soldier; Baily Dao, ex FBI agent; Dino Centro; smarmy yet debonaire as well as a host of new characters who team up to foil a CEO with an evil plan.

Owen Hill is the author of The Chandler Apartments and Loose Ends. He was awarded the Howard Moss Residency for poetry at Yaddo in 2005. He lives in Berkeley, California.

"Very well written, well paced, well time-lined and well-charactered. I chuckled seeing so many of my poetic acquaintances mentioned in the text." --Ed Sanders "Owen Hill's breathless, sly and insouciant mystery novels are full of that rare Dawn Powel-ish essence: fictional gossip. I could imagine popping in and out of his sexy little Chandler building apartment a thousand times and never having the same cocktail buzz twice. Poets have all the fun, apparently." --Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude "Guillaume Appollinaire and Edward Sanders would feast on this thriller of the real Berkeley and its transsexual CIA agents and doppelgangers staging Glock shoot-outs. A mystery of contingencies centering in the reeking Chandler Arms and the quicksand of Moe's Books." --Michael McClure "Is this Berkeley noir? I'd call it lustily readable. And such reading set me to thinking about tone and that to get it right is a saintly gift (which Owen Hill has) of hearing and lavishly staying on one wiggly and implausible note throughout passages of poetic lore, pretty hot sex, action (of all things!) and multi-musings on 'the life' of book writing, book selling and humbly accepting oneself as condemned to love the many leaves we turn with aimless passion before we ourselves rattle and blow away down these raunchy beloved streets." --Eileen Myles, author of The Importance of Being Iceland