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**The latest novel in the acclaimed *Shortcut Man* series is a rousing tale of sex, sleaze, and salvation in the City of Angels that’s “filled with enough dark humor and shady characters to satisfy the most rabid noir fan” (Associated Press). ** Our hero Dick Henry—aka the Shortcut Man—becomes involved in a case featuring an aging but still amorous Los Angeles movie mogul named Howard Hogue who keeps a stable of young starlets available for his highly ritualized attentions. Retained by the sister of a young woman who has gone missing, Henry becomes friendly with Connie Cielo, the “housemother” to the starlets. Despite Connie’s morally questionable responsibilities, she is willing to help (and enjoy the company of) the Shortcut Man. After Hogue’s star director assaults one of these women in a drug-fueled romp, Henry is drawn into a deeper mystery from years past involving a mysterious death on a boat and a missing screenplay written by what appears to be a homeless man. As he peels back layer upon layer of sordid Hollywood history, Dick Henry must contend with crazed drug dealers, Hogue’s personal doctor, crooked cops, private security henchmen, and Hogue himself—who is so powerful and bunkered in his movie-biz millions that he is unfazed by the resourceful Henry. A wry and rollicking read, *Vexations of the Shortcut Man* proves that p.g. sturges is “one of the cleverest and funniest new writers to grace the mystery genre in quite some time” (BookPage.com). ** ### From Booklist Hollywood was never so deliriously debauched as it is in Sturges’ latest Shortcut Man novel. From an opening scene that echoes the Tinsel Town melodrama, The Bad and the Beautiful, to a curiously sentimental epilogue, Sturges lays on the action, the emotion, the violence, the twisted sex, and the black comedy with an oversize trowel, but somehow, it all works splendidly. Dick Henry is the Shortcut Man, a fixer who always finds the most unencumbered route from problem to solution. This time, though, he’s awash in encumbrances. It all starts when a movie mogul, who keeps a harem of starlets, gives his kinky director a solid gold gun, and the director uses said gun to abuse one of the mogul’s starlets in a particularly unsavory fashion. Meanwhile, the Shortcut Man and the housemother to the harem attempt to sort it all out. The violence-fueled comic crime novel is harder to get right than it looks—to parody over-the-top melodrama is to risk losing hold of your narrative as it sails over its own top—but Sturges never loses control. Think the Marx Brothers with blood, sex, and, shockingly, a hint or two of genuine human feeling. --Bill Ott ### About the Author **p.g. sturges **was born in 1953 in Hollywood, California. Punctuated by fitful interludes of school, he has subsequently occupied himself as a submarine sailor, a dimensional metrologist, a Christmas tree farmer, an optical metrologist, a musician, a songwriter, an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter.