Joe Crow Books
From Simon & Schuster, Drawing Dead is Pete Hautman's novel about an ex-cop and his latest, chaotic case. In a fast-paced comic thriller set in Minneapolis, ex-cop Jim Crow finds himself in over his head in a scheme replete with poker-playing hustlers, cocaine, and two con artists selling shares of a rare comic book collection.
Unenthusiastically accepting a job as a bodyguard for an unsavory plastic surgeon, ex-cop Joe Crow soon learns that his employer has vicious enemies and is swept into a web of deadly big game hunting. Reprint.
Seventy-three-year-old ex-poker player Axel Speeter plays a final winner-take-all hand with a pair of crooks who are after the $260,000 he keeps squirreled away in his room at Motel 6. Reprint. Tour.
Racing to save a friend’s daughter from a threatening marriage, Joe Crow finds himself caught in the middle of a conflict between the would-be groom and a murderous cult as he faces cultists, carnies, and cocaine dealers. Poker-playing ex-cop Joe Crow has been dealt some rotten hands in his life, but he’s been lucky enough to survive them all. But when Axel Speeter starts begging for help to save his girlfriend’s daughter, Carmen, from a dangerous marriage, Crow suspects his luck is about to run out. Carmen has just gotten engaged to Hyatt Hilton, a onetime drug pusher who sells bootlegged Evian to pay his bills. When Speeter asks Crow to make sure Hilton is on the straight and narrow, it becomes evident that he is involved in something much more dangerous than fake designer water. As Hilton is dangerously close to becoming a member of a New Age cult convinced of having found the secret to immortality and not scared of killing to prove it, Crow finds himself in the middle of a dangerous fight as he struggles to bring Carmen to safety.
Barbaraannette Quinn loved her husband, Bobby, right up until the day he got in his truck,left their home in Cold Rock, Minnesota, and never returned. She has waited six years for him to walk back through her door, and now that she has hit the Powerball lottery, she's willing to give a million dollars to anyone who can make that happen. Bobby and his girlfriend, Phlox, decide that she will turn him in, collect the million bucks, and then they'll both hightail it back to Arizona to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, everybody wants a piece of Bobby -- including a pair of hulking good ole boys, who figure Bobby owes them, and a sociopathic pretty boy freshout of St. Cloud Correctional, who notices that Barbaraannette's offer doesn't require that Bobby arrive alive. Toss in a shy marathon-running banker, a lovestruck humanities professor, and Barbaraannette's kleptomaniac mother, and things start getting a little hot in Cold Rock. "I've really started something, haven't I?" Barbaraannette says. What she has started is a crackpot criminal conspiracy in Pete Hautman's funniest novel yet.