Carver Cane’s No Ire is a filthy, fast-moving, and surprisingly clever comic noir about a former porn star who mistakes his latest performance for the real thing. Vincenzo Longhorn was once famous for the fourteen-inch member displayed on VHS covers, but now conducts sexual-discovery seminars. At one such seminar, held improbably at Saint Vincent Tabernacle, he meets a beautiful blonde with piercing blue eyes who calls herself Trouble.
Violence and Debauchery at the Salt Creek Little League by Jesse Severson is a broad, gleefully inappropriate satire built around a simple premise: the kids playing Little League baseball are considerably more mature than the adults watching them. What begins as a youth baseball season quickly becomes a circus of parental obsession, marital infidelity, political posturing, petty rivalries, threats, violence, and an increasingly deranged battle over postgame snacks.
Denny Darke’s A Tooth for a Tooth is a gleefully macabre crime novel populated by killers, con artists, crooked preachers, pampered dogs, amateur sleuths, and enough hidden identities to make practically everyone in Horseshoe Bay worth investigating. Darke combines black comedy with a serial-killer thriller, producing a story that is frequently outrageous but also surprisingly interested in the question of who gets to decide when justice has been served.
