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William Morrow
March 2009
On Sale: March 1, 2009
Featuring: Manny Rupert
416 pages ISBN: 0060506652 EAN: 9780060506650 Hardcover
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Mystery | Suspense Psychological | Thriller
From the acclaimed and controversial author of
Permanent Midnight comes one of the most vividly
subversive, savagely funny, and explosive novels yet
unleashed in our tender century. Pain Killers is a
violent and mind-wrenching masterpiece in the gonzo noir
style that has earned Jerry Stahl his legion of avid fans.
Down-and-out ex-cop and not-quite-reformed addict
Manny Rupert accepts a job going undercover to find out if
an old man locked up in a California prison is who he claims
to be: the despicable—and allegedly dead—Josef Mengele, aka
the Angel of Death. What if, instead of drowning thirty
years ago, the sadistic legend whose Auschwitz crimes still
horrify faked his own death and is now locked up in San
Quentin, ranting and bitter about being denied the adulation
he craves for his contribution to keeping the Master Race
pure—if no longer masterful? After accidentally
reuniting with ex-wife and love of his life, Tina, at San
Quentin—they first met at the crime scene where Tina
murdered her first husband with Drano-laced Lucky
Charms—Manny spends a bad night imbibing boxed wine and
questionable World War One morphine, hunched over a trove of
photos showing live genital dissections that plant him in
the middle of a conspiracy involving genocide, drugs,
eugenics, human experiments, and America's secret history of
collusion with German believers in Nordic superiority.
Manny's quest sends him careening from one extreme of
apocalypse-adjacent reality to the other: from SS-inked
Jewish shotcallers to meth-crazed virgin hookers, from
Mexican gangbangers to Big Pharma?financed prison research
to an animal shelter that gasses more than stray dogs and
cats . . . Pain Killers captures one man's
struggle against a perverse and demented scheme of global
proportions, in a literary tour de force as outrageous,
compelling, and dangerous as history itself. Not for the
faint of heart, the novel hurtles readers into a disturbing,
original, and alarmingly real world filled with some of the
kinkiest sex, most horrific violence, and screaming wit ever
found on the page—proving yet again that Stahl is, as The
New Yorker described him, "a better-than-Burroughs
virtuoso."
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