Served Cold
by Ed Goldberg
Available eBook formats:
title:
Served Cold
author:
Ed Goldberg
genre:
Mystery
isbn-
13:
978-1-60174-027-4
length:
Shorter Novel
price:
$6.99
~A cynical PI agrees to do a favor for an old man. The next thing he knows, he's caught up in a morass of revenge and old murders.~
New York PI, Lenny Schneider, agrees to protect a revenge-seeking Holocaust survivor from killing the concentration-camp guard he seeks. Lenny is caught-up in a web of lies and violence mixed with great food, baseball and music.Lenny's story is told in a hip, sometimes bawdy voice, filled with puns, quips and hilarious one-liners.
"Every line is a pip of a quip--deadpan one-line zingers and truly literate insults." Waterville, ME, Sunday Sentinel
I headed west, toward the subway, avoiding puddles as I went. I never step in puddles in New York. They are as likely to be piss or blood as water, and the water is nothing to trust.
Before I got a block, I was braced by a large man in a ragged suit. He was not quite the size of a Clydesdale. His nose was spread over his mined pug's face. His single eyebrow was split by a fine white scar. One ear was twice the minimum daily requirement of cauliflower, and the other was half-missing in action. If this guy's face were a road, 4-wheel drive couldn't hack it. I expected a panhandler. I didn't expect an expert blow to the solar plexus.
I can defend myself pretty well and this galoot was not too fast. But the gut-punch winded me and hurt very effectively. So I back-pedaled, flying to retain my balance.
I found my feet, sucked in a painful breath, and smashed the son of a bitch as hard as I could in the middle of his chest. His piggy eyes widened, and he whooped in air. I knew I had slowed him down. I reached into my pocket for a black-taped roll of nickels I keep for these emergencies, and cocked my fist.
He lumbered toward me on instinct and I caught him flush on the flattened schnozz with a punch that started somewhere in Canarsie. I saw his eyes go out of focus. Then I saw a red flash and a number of stars as something heavy came down upon my head, like Maxwell's silver hammer. I went down, not out, but not precisely conscious either.
As I lay on the sidewalk, I dimly saw a greasy nerd, horn-rim glasses held together at the bridge of the nose by a flesh-colored Band-Aid. In his hand was the lid of a steel 55-gallon drum, with a head-shaped dent in it. He smiled a snaggly smile, and spat on me.
Ed Goldberg was born in The Bronx, New York in 1943. An early and avid reader, Goldberg developed a love and respect for the printed word. Despite a grudging nod to the World's Great Literature, it was always the potboilers that interested him. He read widely in the adventure books for boys, and became a devotee of science fiction pulps. Mark Twain was an early favorite.
His family moved to Long Island, prompting his mother to throw out all his baseball cards. There he attended high school, writing a humor column for the school newspaper, contributing original skits to the Sophomore Show, and doing school plays. His discovery of H.L. Mencken, Lenny Bruce, and "Waiting for Godot," began to develop a dark side. He attempted to do stand-up comedy, unsuccessfully.
In 1991, he moved to Portland, Oregon and finished his first novel, Served Cold, winner of the 1995 Shamus Award for best original paperback fiction. He works at radio station KBOO-FM, where he does movie reviews, author interviews, produced five half-hours of original comedy, and has had a radio play produced about the anti-red witch-hunts of the 50s. Goldberg also DJs at classical KBPS-FM.
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