DEAD NOIR
A pulsating, brooding detective story in a land where no one has a pulse. Raymond Chandler steps into Pixar’s Coco.
You’re peering over the shoulder of Alfonso, a triggerman working off his sentence to the Powers That Be. Imagine your average Philly cop, but with the vestige of a conscience - and far less benefits.
Alfonso is tired. Dead tired. Tired of working a dead end job, in a dead end career, at the dead end of the purgatorial city of Marrow, at the dead end of the world. But that’s OK – because everyone here is just as dead as he is.
But when a Marrow debutante shows up on her family’s doorstep resting in pieces, Alfonso finds himself tossed onto a case that the real authorities of Marrow would prefer be left unexhumed.
A smarter man would bury every lead six feet under.
A smarter man would leave the bucket unkicked.
A smarter man would serve his sentence and sell the farm.
But Alfonso, like everyone else in Marrow, is at the mercy of the Powers That Be, so unless he prefers his corpse to be pushing up daisies himself, any other choice but to find a murderer is… Dead Wrong.
(cover artwork credit: © Andreas Porsch)
A devilishly churlish take on an underworld purgatory our doomed species may as well already be living in, K.S. Avard delivers the most darkly quick-witted novel I have read all year, and is perchance the best new neo-Noir writer this side of Mickey Spillane. – Glenn W. Leaper
DEAD NOIR
11.02.2026
DIA DE LOS MUERTOS