The Slanted Gutter - S. Craig Zahler

\n \nTake a roller coaster ride through the gutter in this gripping pull-no-punches thriller from S. Craig Zahler\n \n \n \nHe knows what you'll do - including what you'll sacrifice for protection.\n \n \n\n \nDarren Tasking is an entrepreneur whose business is people, and when it comes to people he specializes in risk, pleasure, and fear.\n \n \n\n \nHe knows what will break you - before you even feel a second of pain.\n \n \n\n \nTasking has everything and everyone, in his orbit, under control. If there's something he wants he will alter your life, elaborately and maliciously, until you yield to his wishes.\n \n \n\n \nHe knows what makes the Machos tick - and how to keep them in the dark.\n \n \n\n \nThe police tried to keep Tasking down with their macho modus operandi, sent him away long ago, but they couldn't keep him incarcerated forever. Now he's older, uncommonly careful, and keeps the machos oblivious to his enterprises. But when he meets a dancer named Erin Green at the Cherry Red strip club everything changes.\n \n \n\n \nHe knows the streets of Great Crown, Florida can only be dominated by the remorseless insights of a relentless slick like him.\n \n \n\n \nThe brothels and gambling parlors secreted behind iron doors keep the slick autonomous and successful, but Erin proves to be the variable that could put him on a collision course with unrepentant sadists, machos, and a trap created by the slick's own extortionist machinations.\n \n \n\n \nThe Slanted Gutter is a devastating character study painted with the darkest shades of noir, penned by a hand as unflinching as Tasking's steely-eyed pursuit of his large dollar goal, as unforgiving on the reader as those who seek retribution against the slick for his nocturnal misdeeds.\n \n \n\n \nStep into this gutter at your own risk.\n