by Joe R. Lansdale
 
Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, the popular Texas heroes of the best-selling The Two-Bear Mambo, embark on a picaresque adventure down South when Leonard is named the prime suspect in connection with the murder of a local good ol' boy. 

"Don't you get a little tired working so hard to be folksy?" Hap Collins asks a colorful, clod-kicking private eye named Jim Bob Luke. "Naw," Jim Bob tells him. "I figure it's kind of an edge. People don't know what you're really thinking. They think you're just a shallow good ole boy." Nobody would ever think that about Collins, who looks like a long-haired '70s dropout and is seriously worried about the quality of his life.
 
With his best buddy Leonard Pine--who aside from being black and gay is extremely tough and nasty in a firefight--Hap goes after the biker who first stole and then killed Pine's boyfriend.
 
Jim Bob also gets involved in the chase, which converges on a corrupt local chili entrepreneur and a totally convincing Texas tornado. Two other Hap Collins books, Mucho Mojo and The Two-Bear Mambo, are available in paperback.

From Booklist
Leonard Pine is distraught. His lover, Raul, has left him for a biker. Leonard's pal and sleuthing partner, Hap Collins, wants to be there for his buddy, but before Hap can help, the biker is found headless. Leonard is quickly dismissed as a suspect, but then Raul's body is discovered, extensively tortured. Clearly, the LaBorde, Texas, police department has no interest in solving what is viewed only as a homosexual killing. Leonard can't let it go.
 
He and Hap descend into a vortex of police corruption, gay bashing for video profit, and a truly bizarre business scam, all masterminded by the local chili king. Lansdale is in top form with this latest Collins-Pine caper. Where else in the mystery world could one find a plot that hinges on the big money to be made in recycled restaurant grease--and, as an aside, a critique of the Gilligan's Island reunion movie. Lansdale is politically correct one minute and politically incorrect the next, simultaneously funny and tragic, and wildly profane yet invariably humane. In his unique way, he reveals the human condition--our darkest secrets and our proudest moments, all within the unlikely confines of an East Texas adventure featuring the two scruffiest protagonists in modern crime fiction. Wes Lukowsky

From Kirkus Reviews
Think your love life is complicated? Leonard Pine, fired from his job as the Hot Cat Club's bouncer (don't ask why), is mopey because his boyfriend Raul has taken a shine to biker Horse McNee. After threatening and cold-cocking the Other Man, Leonard is naturally the number one suspect when Horse is found in his car, run off the road, shotgunned to death by a weapon a lot like Leonard's--though Lt. Charlie Blank has no way of comparing them until he finds out where Leonard's hiding. Leonard's only hope is his old buddy Hap Collins, who's just started his own little romance with Brett Sawyer, the forthright night nurse who offers to give him a shot in the rear while he's in the hospital getting treated for rabies (don't ask why). Raul seems to be the man to find, Hap and Leonard agree during an unauthorized sabbatical that Hap's taking from the hospital--and find him they do, hideously tortured, presumably by the gang of video artists whose line of gay stalk-and-rape tapes is headlined by Kickin' Fairies, which Hap and Leonard have been lucky enough to purchase. Jim Bob Luke, a can-do shamus visiting LaBorde to avenge one of the video victims, is convinced the ringleader is Charles Arthur, the Chili King; Hap isn't so sure. What everybody agrees on, though, is that the gay-bashing auteurs really want that incriminating videotape back, and they don't care what they have to do to get it. Hap's effortless talent as a downscale East Texas raconteur (The Two-Bear Mambo, 1995, etc.) makes him the funniest of Travis McGee's widely dispersed sons, even when he's writing about truly menacing bad guys. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
The mayhem is always flashy in these Texas Gothics, and the foulmouthed jokes would keep a crew of oil riggers in stitches. But there's more true art in the loopy bar conversations and front-porch anecdotes that Lansdale tosses back like peanuts. -- The New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio