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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Victor Gischler lives in Skiatook, Oklahoma among the scorpions and the cowpokes. He teaches creative writing at Rogers State University. His crime-writing heroes are Scott Phillips, James Crumley, and John D. MacDonald. Warren Zevon, Abba and Frank Sinatra make his toe tap. Boy bands and most other pop make him reach for his Webley revolver (and/or his double-barrel shotgun). Victor's first novel, Gun Monkeys, was nominated for the Edgar Award.
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ABOUT THE BOOK

An unlucky grad student just got himself killed in a robbery gone bad. And as lowly drug lieutenant Harold Jenks races with the killer out of the alley, a light goes off in his head: He'll steal the dead kid's identity. Now Jenks, who once lorded it over seven square blocks in East St. Louis, is headed due west. With a .32 in his pocket, a 9mm Glock taped across his back, and a rap sheet nearly as long as Finnegans Wake, he's cruising the halls of academia as Eastern Oklahoma U's newest grad student, looking for action and hoping he can stay one couplet ahead of his violent past.

Across campus visiting professor Jay Morgan has a more pressing problem: What to do about the dead coed in his bed. The Professor's no killer, but try telling that to private eye Deke Stubbs. Then more trouble blows into town as St. Louis drug boss Red Zach and his minions converge on Fumbee, Oklahoma, looking for a consignment of missing cocaine... For Morgan and Jenks, now desperate fugitives from poetic justice, survival means learning new skills — and learning fast. Because if they find out they're bottom-of-the-class, that means they're already dead.

Featuring the sleaziest, sorriest, and most captivating group of criminal lowlifes, sexed-up academics, poets, and rappers ever to collide in one crime novel, The Pistol Poets speeds deliriously to its electrifying payoff.

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CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'The Pistol Poets is in numerous ways politically incorrect, which decent satire almost has to be, and its twisted tale of gangsters and poets, if not profound, will brighten the day of anyone blessed with a sense of humor'
- The Washington Post

'Gischler challenges Kinky Friedman for top slot in the zany noir subgenre of mystery fiction - and for sheer mayhem and body count momentum, Gischler may triumph. '
- Publishers Weekly [read the full review]

'Slightly over the top, perhaps, but an utterly entertaining foray into a very bent version of academia'
- Jenny McLarin, Booklist [read the full review]

'Gischler, who teaches at a university in Oklahoma, knows how to make his characters not only hilarious caricatures, but also just intelligent enough to be worth rooting for.'
- Peter Mergendahl, Rocky Mountain News [read the full review]