Chop Shop - Andrew Post (Blog Tour)

Once again I'm thrilled to be participating in a blog tour for one of Flame Tree Press's newest titles.  Read on to find out why I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Andrew Post in the future.

TITLE: Chop Shop

AUTHOR: Andrew Post

PUBLISHER: Flame Tree Press

PUBLISHING DATE: June 13, 2019

FROM GOODREADS: Frank Goode used to be a doctor, until he got caught selling prescription medication he stole from work. But once a sawbones always a sawbones, Frank now operates a back-alley surgery shop out of his living room pulling slugs out of wannabe gangsters and offering the local working girls discount STD testing. When a unsanctioned hit goes down in his home, Frank is left scrambling to both get rid of the corpse and invent a believable story for the dead enforcer's highly concerned (crime) family to explain the dead man's whereabouts. According to his friend and equipment supplier, Ted, getting rid of the body is no problem. Because Ted is affiliated with "the network," a group of human body part traffickers. Frank jumps at the chance to rid his house of the 185-pound piece of evidence, but that still doesn't explain to the Russian mob what happened to their buddy... Meanwhile, Amber Hawthorne and Jolene Morris, business partners and roommates at the Hawthorne Funeral Home, are drowning in debt. People are complaining about the makeup jobs they're giving deceased loved ones--the word clownish has been used--and both young women have a little trouble keeping their partying habits in line. When they start selling body parts on the black market to keep their business alive (Jolene much more reluctantly than Amber), their new buyers seem friendly and trustworthy enough at first. That is until the dead gangster they've recently parted up turns out to have been full of disease. Now Amber and Jolene's buyers want something else to make up for lost profits, leaving the two undertakers to learn sometimes running a business can cost an arm and a leg. 

MY THOUGHTS: When I first started reading "Chop Shop," I had no idea what was waiting for me. What I discovered was fast-paced thriller that leaves the reader little time to breath before the next big thing happens.

Frank Goode runs an emergency room for questionable characters from his dining room after losing his medical license and going to prison for his illegal activities in a Minnesota clinic.  One night Frank helps a young lady associated with a local crime organization, and has no idea how much he'll come to regret that decision.  Along the way Frank receives help from Ted, a childhood friend who also may be in over his head and best friends, Amber and Jolene, who run the local funeral home.  Before long, Amber and Jolene are mixed up in selling red-market body parts and Frank ends up being the one client they may wish had never knocked on their door.

I actually found the characters in "Chop Shop" pretty likable despite their lack of morality.  Post did a wonderful job making them highly flawed, but despite their flaws, I never felt the three of them were irredeemable.  Jolene and Amber went to college together and I believe their friendship is one of the biggest strengths in the whole novel.  Although down on their luck and cutting up a dead mobster in their basement, I was still cheering for them to come out on top.  So while "Chop Shop" is full of action, I actually think I enjoyed getting to know the characters more.

Now speaking of action, there is a ton of it within this novel's pages.  Two Minnesota crime families are at war and the causalities are high.  This book is not for the squeamish.  But it is for people who enjoy mobster movies and classics such as "Scarface" and "Goodfellows."  I have a soft spot for mobster movies which is perhaps one reason why this book was such a good fit for me.  "Chop Shop" is classified as horror but there is nothing supernatural here.  Post paints of vivid and mesmerizing picture of the most horrific thing out there - humans.

RATING: 5 PAWS

Andrew Post was born in Erie, Pennsylvania(imagine Eraserhead but in color). While he was honing his craft as a writer (those early stories were awful) he worked in a gift shop in one of the scuzziest hotels in the Midwest, he cleaned rental cars (also gross), he was a butcher (despite being a vegetarian),and in 2013 his first novel, the cyberpunk thriller, Knuckleduster, was published. No one really seemed to care much but he kept at it and has since published a handful of other works to varying degrees of resulting public interest with a few seeing translations and one almost became a movie (that lit agent has since been fired). 

For Chop Shop, Andrew was inspired by the (early) films of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie,and Martin Scorsese, as well as the deliberately over the-top horror films of the 80s like Peter Jackson's Braindead. That was the goal with Chop Shop: a comedic crime caper with buckets of gore.

 Andrew lives in a sleepy river town in Minnesota where he may or may not be planning aquatic "accidents"to befall the many othe rauthors who live in the area and he has been mistaken for Rob Zombie on no less than ten separate occasions. 

COYER CHALLENGE:  Read a book with no magical or futuristic elements.