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Title: Hard Case Bore
Review: If you've been following Hard Case Crime, you know they've put together a distinguished catalog of noir novels. One assumes their publication of a very bad novel by Stephen King was a deliberate mistake aimed directly at the bottom line. But there is no excuse for the Shubin book. There is no complexity, no twists, nothing going on beneath the surface, no surprises, no relationship of any kind with the traditional noir gestures. Anything suggestive of there being more going on than meets the eye, proves to be digressions that signify nothing. The characters are bland and unintersting and the plot almost nonexistent. A fifteen year old boy sexually abuses a twelve year old girl and then kills her. Fifteen years later he turns himself in and goes to prison. Big deal. If he had turned himself in at once, this book wouldn't exist, and we would all be better off.
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