Review: Piggyback by Tom Pitts

Chris Leek Independent Reviewer Contact Chris to have your work reviewed.

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The blurb on the cover of Piggyback tells you to think ‘Don Winslow meets Christopher Cooke’. That sounds pretty cool, they’re both fine authors. But this is a book written by Tom Pitts which is really the only incentive you should need to read it.
 

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“…they’re good girls, Rebecca and Michelle. They’re not the types to burn someone like me. They might be in trouble, you know.”

“Well, you definitely are.”

Paul has screwed up or maybe that should be Paul is a screw up. Using a couple of hop-head collage girls to move a trunk-load of bud to Utah seemed like a good idea at the time, but now the girls have gone missing and Paul is in deep shit. Losing the weed is bad enough, but this load had five kilos of blow riding piggyback and that’s a whole other kind of trouble. Paul’s only hope is to persuade his pal, Jimmy to help him get it back before it's too late. 

Jimmy is a serious guy, a lone professional in amongst all the hopeful chancers and hopeless amateurs. He takes his work seriously too. The tools of his trade are a snub nose .38 and an absence of conscience. He doesn’t suffer fools easily, but when the opportunity to score a cut of Paul’s missing load presents itself, he’s prepared to make an exception.

What follows is a rollercoaster road trip in the pursuit of lost pot that leaves a trail of cracked heads, spent bullets and bummed smokes strewn halfway across Northern California.

Piggyback is a stone cold blast that crackles like crossed wires and never misses a beat or passes up an opportunity to splatter some cherry pie on the walls. Tom Pitts is as skillful an exponent of hard-boiled noir as you will find working anywhere today. His writing is a glorious carnival of tightly wound plot, brilliant bad ass characters and realistically gritty dialogue.

To put it simply, Piggyback rocks. It’s slick, stylish and a hell of a lot of fun. Hollywood movie moguls should be falling over themselves to option it; for students of silver screen pulp that would be the best news since Butch told Fabienne that Zed was dead.

If you're reading this Mr.Tarantino, you need to make your check payable to Tom Pitts.

If you're not a millionaire movie producer, just make that check out to cash and go buy this book.