The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley Narrated by Johnny Heller

Overview

Michael Wiley's first novel, The Last Striptease, was nominated for a Shamus Award and hailed as “riveting” (Chicago Tribune), “delightful” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “hard-boiled fiction with tenderness and compassion” (New York Newsday). Now he offers another exciting, fast-paced page-turner with The Bad Kitty Lounge.

Greg Samuelson, an unassuming bookkeeper, hired Joe Kozmarski to dig up dirt on his wife and her lover, Eric Stone. But now Samuelson has taken matters into his own hands. It looks like he's torched Stone's Mercedes, killed his boss, and then shot himself, all in the space of an hour.

The police think they know how to put together this ugly puzzle. But as Kozmarski discovers, nothing's ever simple. Eric Stone wants to hire Kozmarski to clear Samuelson. Samuelson's dead boss, known as the Virginity Nun, has a saintly reputation but a red-hot past. And a gang led by an aging 1960s radical shows up in Kozmarski's office with a backpack full of payoff money, warning him to turn a blind eye to murder.

At the same time, Kozmarski is working things out with his ex-wife, Corrine, his new partner, Lucinda Juarez, and his live-in nephew, Jason. If the bad guys don't do Kozmarski in, his family might.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

Sinful seeds bear murderous fruit. Chicago private eye Joe Kozmarski doesn't much like the Samuelson case, a run-of-the-mill no-brainer if ever there was one. You load your camera, bag the requisite salacious shots of the adulterous Mrs. Samuelson, hand them over to the cuckolded client. Soon enough, however, it becomes obvious to Joe-astute sleuth that he proved himself to be in his debut (The Last Striptease, 2007)-that this is a case with legs, thanks in part to the high-profile corpse lying in Greg Samuelson's office. Sister Judy Terrano was nicknamed the Virginity Nun, a condition forensic evidence renders dubious. Her clothes are in disarray, her belly inscribed with the faded tattoo of a cat in what appears to be a state of arousal. Beneath this, in magic marker, someone has scrawled, "Bad kitty." The client himself is also in his office, comatose, bleeding copiously from a bullet wound the cops say is self-inflicted. Murder-suicide, they insist, but Joe begs to differ. Skepticism deepens when he launches an investigation that reveals ancient and murky connections between Sister Judy and a pair of powerful Chicago families, the kind for whom old injuries are never really old, and vengeance never less than sweet. Sound and fury and mindless violence, signifying that a pretty good writer has yet to find a story commensurate with his talent.

From the Publisher

With a twisting tangle of plotlines, The Bad Kitty Lounge keeps us guessing till the end.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“If you like tough thrillers, this is for you.” —The Washington Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169602166
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	04/07/2011
Series:	Joseph Kozmarski , #2
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

ONE I SAT IN TOMMY Cheng’s Chinese Restaurant facing a window onto North LaSalle Street and watched a four-story condo complex where Eric Stone was screwing another man’s wife. Not the kind of work I look for, but it always seems to . nd me. I kept my eyes on my client’s condo and ate egg foo yong.
Behind me in the kitchen, Mr. Cheng cooked something that sizzled in the wok. He wore an apron and a white baseball cap. My Pentax, its telephoto screwed into focus, rested on the coun­ter in case Eric Stone showed his face outside.
I squinted into the glare. The little birch trees that the city had dumped into sidewalk planters .ared October yellow. The condo complex was stucco and had the kind of Spanish arches and wide balconies that belonged far from Chicago in a place where the sea was always clear and the breeze blew as warm as a woman’s breath.
A man walked onto the balcony in front of the condo.
Eric Stone.
I dropped my chopsticks, readjusted the lens on the pentax, and snapped a photo. The man had a caterpillar of a beard un­der his bottom lip. The rest of his head was shaved. He looked somewhere in his early .fties but his arms and body were thick—all muscle. He .exed the arms over his head. He wore white shorts and a white T-shirt on a forty-degree autumn day. He looked like a pirate in tennis whites.
A woman joined him on the balcony.
Amy Samuelson. My client Greg Samuelson’s wife.
She was dressed in khakis and a sweater, her blond hair in a ponytail. She wrapped her arms around Eric Stone from be­hind.
Mr. Cheng came from the kitchen and stood next to me. “Every day the same thing,” he said, laughing. “She never gets enough of him.”
She slid her hands down the man’s stomach. One hand dis­appeared into the front of his shorts. Stone looked proud of himself.
Mr. Cheng said, “Some people’ve got no decency,” and I snapped more photos. “What do you do?” he asked. “Blackmail them?”
I pulled out my wallet, let him read my detective’s license.
“Joe Kozmarski?” he said.
“I’m helping her husband get a divorce.”
He laughed. “You blackmail them.”
Amy Samuelson and the man went back into the condo, clos­ing the door behind them.
I ate more egg foo yong. The bean sprouts were fresh, the shrimp as big as walnuts. Mr. Cheng stood and watched the balcony as if he expected them to come back out naked and screw in the open air.
Another man walked across a parking lot next to the condos. He was thin, wearing blue jeans, an oxford shirt, and a navy blue jacket, no tie. He carried a two-gallon gas can. He looked in no hurry. He crossed to a yellow Mercedes convert­ible that was parked facing the street.
I knew the car. Eric Stone drove it when he wasn’t . exing his muscles on the Samuelsons’ balcony in his tennis shorts.
The man set the gas can on the hood of the Mercedes and undid the cap. He screwed a spout onto the can. He poured gasoline over the car’s hood, over the convertible roof, onto the trunk.
Mr. Cheng said, “What the hell—”
The man shook gasoline onto the car doors. He stooped by the tires and poured gas over them. He took his time.
“Take—pictures,” Mr. Cheng sputtered. I left my camera on the counter.
The man splashed the rest of the gasoline under the Mer­cedes, then stepped back to appraise his work.
He touched the fabric convertible roof with a lighter and leaped away. The car burst into .ames. Thick black smoke .ngered into the air. The convertible top .ared and fell into the interior.
The man with the gas can watched the .re, then pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed, and talked into it. When he hung up, he walked slowly away. The empty gas can dangled in his .ngers. The car made a hollow popping sound and the windshield fell into the front seat.
Mr. Cheng glared. “Why don’t you take pictures?”
I looked him up and down. “That was the husband—My my client.”
Mr. Cheng stared at me with blank eyes and nodded, then returned to the kitchen and called 911. He told the operator that a car was burning and gave the street address. When he hung up, he came back and sat on the stool next to mine. “You like the egg foo yong?” he asked.
“Best egg foo yong I ever ate,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s my mother’s recipe. It gives you long life.”
We sat together and watched the Mercedes burn. Giant .ames angled out of the interior. The car roared like an open furnace. Heavy black smoke, dense as dirt, clouded above it. The smell of burning rubber and something worse—the leather interior, something that once was living—made its way into the restaurant. By the time we heard sirens, the . re had blackened the car’s exterior, and whatever was feeding it from inside was gone. The .ames shortened. Then the gas tank exploded and the .re roared again.
I pushed away the egg foo yong. Long life it would give me, said Mr. Cheng. I’d lost my appetite.

Excerpted from The Bad Kitty Lounge by Michael Wiley.
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Wiley.
Published in March 2010 by St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

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