Slater Ibáñez

Created by George Bixley

SLATER IBÁÑEZ is an ill-tempered, violence-prone insurance investigator has two problems: alcohol and keeping it zipped. He prowls the streets of LA, looking for insurance fraud and sex, “keeping his balance with the jobs that his employer, Della, throws his way, and the back-channel support he gets from his idiot cop ex-boyfriend, Conrad.”

As one blub so charmingly puts it, “Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with.”

He’s appeared in twelve books (so far), that one reader calls “hard-boiled, veering on pulp,” the Goodreads blurb tags him as “a queer antihero for a new age,” and his Amazon bio pegs the author, George Bixley, as someone who finally found “his groove in Los Angeles, settling into the seedy underbelly of the metropolis and trying to keep ahead of the wave of gentrification. Bixley sells his soul by day and dredges the bottom by night.”

Un huh.

Which makes the choice of cover art for the books (all tastefully abstract and so inoffensively boring even Aunt Martha wouldn’t object) so surprising. They look like battered and much loathed high school chemistry textbooks, with not a single glistening, throbbing, chiseled male torso in sight.

What was it that Bo Diddley said about books and covers?

NOVELS

Preliminary report and snarky remarks respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Suggested by Pekka.

 

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