Three on a Light by, Victor Gischler

One of the nice things about e-readers is trying out new authors.  For the low-low price of $0.99 (or sometimes $1.99), you can read something from someone you've never read before.  Some of my friends have been singing the praises of Victor Gischler (Shotgun Opera, The Deputy) for a while, so when he announced his sort story collection Three on a Light was going to be available for free for a limited time, I jumped on it. As the author of a book called Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, you can expect that things aren't going to be run-of-the-mill.

A cool thing about this collection is the stories are interconnected.  It almost reads like a season of an FX show with both serialized and standalone elements.  Private eye Dean Murphy picks up a fancy looking Zipo lighter at a flea market.  Once he returns home, his cases take on a weird (read: supernatural) flavor.  Instead of unfaithful wives and insurance scammers, he's now beset by werewolves, changelings, and witches.  We find out later that all this is happening to him because the lighter was cursed by a gypsy mechanic.

I typically don't go for supernatural, but since it's tied to a familiar genre (the PI story) and handled with humor, I really dug it (like I used to dig The X-Files).  Gischler mentioned he wrote these stories as a grad student as an exercise in putting multiple genres in a blender and hitting "frappe".  They certainly don't read like the brain droppings of a grad student.  Like in all short story collections some are better than others, but they are all handled with aplomb.

The collection is fast-paced and fun and worth your Kindle dollar.