Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 98, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 588 & 589, October 1991

Начало книги

It started to snow. Slowly at first, big flakes wafting out of the dark, then more heavily. A blizzard. In August. Bren blinked, rubbed his eyes, but the snow kept coming.

He fought down a surge of panic. The snow wasn’t real. He knew it, he’d seen it before. It was only a speeder dream, a hallucination. But one with a heavy message. Too little sleep, too many amphetamines. Wake up, Brennan, you’re close to the edge.

In reviewing his first novel, The Cheerio Killings (St. Martin’s), Publishers Weekly said of Doug Allyn, “He displays a flair for gritty, colloquial dialogue... and a talent for making even the most incidental characters flesh-and-blood originals...”

“Put this hearse in reverse, I wanna live my life over againnn—”

Brennan roared out the chorus, bellowing along with KCQ, Michigan North Country, over the truck radio in his eighteen-wheeler. He was rolling through the middle of a hot August night, southbound on a secondary road, hammer down, headed for Motown with a load of engine blocks from a factory in Kenosha, Wisc. The radio was cranked to the max, the rig’s windows were wide open, the windblast ripping into the cab, making his eyes stream, but the racket wasn’t working any more. Bren had been twitching the last thirty miles, nodding out, his head jerking up from split-second blankouts. Almost home. Eight days on the road, crisscrossing four states and the Canadian border, more’n seven thousand miles, the last fifteen hundred or so running strung-out on coffee, No-Doz, poppers, Black Beauties, and raw nerve.

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