Author Description

"Tom Leins' Paignton is close to Hell on earth. His battle-scarred PI Joe Rey is navigating every circle of it here - hookers, pimps, pornographers, killers, crooked cops, and every other grotesque you could care (or not) to imagine make up the colourful characters in this grim collection of noir from one of the premier writers of gut-wrenching dark fiction currently at work. One day people will talk about the fiction of Tom Leins the same way they talk about Derek Raymond's - get on board now and when that day comes you'll be able to brag you were round at the start."<br> <br> -- <b>Paul Heatley</b>, author of <i>An Eye For An Eye (Near To The Knuckle</i> and <i>Fatboy (All Due Respect)</i>.<br> "If you had to kill someone with a book, you'd use this one. Cracked skulls. Bruised knuckles. Wounds in the shape of unnameable body parts. Characters as broken and misshapen as the populace of a violent noir hell-scape. Tom Leins writes like a man skinned by jackals and doused in lighter fluid. Meat Bubbles & Other Stories is a new paradigm in noir - Paignton noir, an aesthetic built on images that'd make a seasoned leg-breaker squeal like a school girl."<br> <br> -- <b>Matt Phillips</b>, author of <i>Bad Luck City (Near To The Knuckle</i> and <i>Accidental Outlaws (All Due Respect)</i>.<br> "Welcome to the nightmare factory - there's dark and then there's Tom Leins' Paignton... By parts a mix of the brutality of Hubert Selby Jr and the pure noir-ish banter of Ray Banks with more than a dash of the good old ultra-violence. Thirteen brutal shorts and then the extended nightmare of Snuff Racket. You'd have to go a long way to beat the sheer violence, brutality, humour and brilliance of Meat Bubbles."<br> <br> -- <b>Benedict J. Jones</b>, author of <i>Pennies For Charon</i> and <i>The Devil's Brew (Crime Wave Press)</i>.<br> Still licking his wounds after the brutal events of SKULL MEAT, Paignton private investigator Joe Rey is reluctant to take on another case that could ha