“You're going to love meeting Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs, a pair of hip homicide detectives with the LAPD; unless, of course, you're the perp. Smart, funny and intuitive, Lomax and Biggs glide through the overlit shoals of Los Angeles like sharks through ginger ale. As up to the minute as they are intensely observant, the guys, this time, prowl the golden muck of the LA real estate bubble to fine effect; an exhilarating read.”
This is a recommendation from the late Donald Westlake for Marshall Karp’s third Lomax and Briggs mystery, Flipping Out.
Add to that no faint praise from Publishers Weekly: “Blending the gritty realism of a Joseph Wambaugh police procedural with the sardonic humor of Janet Evanovich, Karp delivers a treat that's no only laugh-out-loud funny but also remarkably suspenseful.”
Here’s the storyline: Nora Bannister writes murder mysteries with a twist – a very lucrative twist. She buys a run-down house in LA, and while her business partners turn it into a showpiece, Nora makes it the scene of a grisly murder in her bestselling House To Die For series.
Wow, that sounds like a good idea for a television reality show.
As soon as the book goes on sale, there’s a bidding frenzy – it seems a lot of people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in a real house where a fictional character has died a violent death.
When the house-flippers start turning up dead, Lomax and Biggs are assigned the case, which turns out to be a real hot potato. The dead women were the wives of their fellow cops, and the next logical target is Marilyn Biggs – Terry Biggs’s wife.
Lomax and Briggs made their debut in The Rabbit Factory in 2006 and their second appearance in Bloodthirsty in 2007. You can find their “biographies” on Karp’s website, along with information about how to keep in touch with the author on Facebook and Twitter. This is one author who knows how to use the latest in social networking to his advantage!
