“The Miata jumped the curb and sheared off a light pole. The impact deployed the airbags, but Chainbang was ready. He knifed Klinger’s before it was fully inflated and his own before it could crush the glass pipe in his breast pocket. The six-inch blade went through the nylon like a pit bull through a kindergarten.”
Snitch World takes place in a San Francisco of menacing technology, where the old cons come up short and the crimes of the gritty night have morphed into slick capers pulled off by the glow of a smartphone.
Klinger hangs out at the Hawse Hole, a sordid dive even by Tenderloin standards. All he really wants is enough cash to buy a cup of coffee, some cigarettes, a bug-free hotel room. The simple act of picking a carefully targeted mark’s pocket initiates a series of events that get stranger and more dangerous by the moment. Jim Nisbet, with his characteristic humor and brilliant prose, creates a world where trust, and even cash, are the avatars of a loser’s game.
This is Snitch World, where a nine-dollar app can be as deadly as a dirty needle.
Also included is a recent interview with Jim Nisbet, in conversation with Patrick Marks, owner and publisher of San Francisco’s The Green Arcade, talking about writing, books, and technology.
What People Are Saying
""Missing any book by Nisbet should be considered a crime in all 50 states and maybe against humanity.” Bill Ott, Booklist
"Jim Nisbet is a poet…[who] resembles no other crime fiction writer. He mixes the irony of Dantesque situations with lyric narration, and achieves a luxuriant cocktail that truly leaves the reader breathless." Drood's Review of Mysteries
"Jim Nisbet is a lot more than just good...powerful, provocative…Nisbet's style has overtones of Walker Percy's smooth southern satin, but his characters—losers, grifters, con men—hark back to the days of James M. Cain's twisted images of morality." Toronto Globe-Mail
“Jim Nisbet's work has been tapping directly into the pulse of America for decades. Like others who have done the same in the past, its only later that the rest of us catch up and realize just how right those trailblazers were all along. That time is now, for all of us to not only catch up to this unheralded master but to offer him the respect and regard that he deserves.” Spinetingler
About the Author
San Francisco writer Jim Nisbet has published nine novels, including the acclaimed Lethal Injection. He has also published five volumes of poetry. His novel, Dark Companion, was shorted-listed for the 2006 Hammett Prize. His works have been published in French as well as English, along with a miscellany of additional translations into German, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek and, forthcoming, Russian and Romanian.