COMING THIS MONTH!
Celebrate all-American pulp fiction with Arbogast's "The Sad, Violent Life of Sandy Preston"
1325 Publishing is proud to announce that this July will see the publication of The Sad, Violent Life of Sandy Preston by Arbogast (@Arbogast1325).
Two novellas in a single volume, The Sad, Violent Life of Sandy Preston covers the pathetic career of Sandy Preston—failed leftist mercenary, failed Florida man, failed private eye. In the first book, Heartbreak & Lechery (originally published by Terror House in March 2024), Sandy is a cut-rate private investigator in Gainesville, Florida who takes a job on behalf of Cindy Brubaker, a bartender with a missing sister. Said sister is named Marie, and she is a successful blackmailer who gets snatched up before she can be sold to a powerful crime boss in Miami. Sandy is sent down a hot and bloody rabbit hole that features three Gainesville hoods, an outlaw biker with a sadistic streak, and a complex web of sex trafficking, drugs, and murder.
A decade after the events in Heartbreak & Lechery, Sandy has relocated to rural Mid-Atlantic where, in a county that has outlawed all burials, he takes a job as the overnight manager of a funeral home that doubles as a laboratory. Sandy is in charge of making sure every county corpse is “repurposed” for biomedical research and the cosmetics industry. Sandy’s quiet, anonymous life gets upended by a co-worker accused of smuggling body parts from the funeral home, and a deputy who asks Sandy to solve the case of a missing pyx. These two investigations eventually intertwine in a sordid world of Satanic sleaze.
The Sad, Violent Life of Sandy Preston is hard-boiled detective fiction with a twist of horror. Sandy is no Marlowe or Spade, and every time he stumbles forward, our hapless (anti) hero pays for his unintentional success.
Short, punchy, violent, and tragic, this is the book you need for your dirty, black summer.
Glorious cover art by the one and only Matthew Lawrence.
Sounds interesting. I do like detective fiction. I’m reading Huysmans’ Down There right now, which isn’t a detective novel per se but does involve investigation.