Beautiful, Naked & Dead by Josh Stallings

Well Stallings said he has a number of writing idols as inspiration. So where does such raw-nerved writing come from? It is a journey through murder, mobsters, self-doubt, booze and bullets, and it is just so well done the reader freely bathes in it all. If you tear down the eventual hero to the most basic shell, anything you do as a writer which gives him back some heart and soul will be appreciated all the more by the reader.Īnd the book gets into that after those first 40-pages, dragging McGuire out of his personal malaise by dragging him through the quagmire of someone else’s badly frayed life. Early on McGuire offered little to like, but that was part of his dark charm too.Īnd in some respects it was a good tool for Stallings. There was a noir-ish mood to the story, but it was a bit slow out of the blocks, although as a first novel of a series, I do appreciate the need to establish some foundation.Īnd Stallings was doing that by painting his hero in dark hues of self-loathing. Well I will say 40, or so pages into ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’ I was not exactly disappointed, but I was sort of wondering at the pace of things. Now sometimes when your expectation bar gets set rather high, it only means a long fall into disappointment. I note debut because ‘Out There Bad’ and ‘One More Body’ have followed. That was enough for me to want to read the debut of Moses McGuire.

home, through the legal brothels of Nevada and finally to a battle with the mob in the mountains above Palo Alto, it is a sex soaked, rage driven, road trip from hell.” Moses McGuire a suicidal strip club bouncer is out to avenge the death of one of his girls. Reading a bit about the novel online had set the seed that this book could be something rather tasty in terms of one of my favoured genres.įrom Stallings’ website ( “Beautiful, Naked & Dead is hard-boiled crime novel. Being a lover of gritty, noir-inspired, pulpy detective stories, I was rather stoked by the prospect of reading Josh Stallings ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’.

Beautiful, Naked & Dead by Josh Stallings