"Grim and gritty, Robb White's Haftmann series will curl the hairs on your neck."

--H. L. Osterman, Short Changed

 

"Nocturne for Madness . . . was one hard-to-read novel. Not because of the writing, but the fact it was so dark and sometimes shocking I had to put it away. Haftmann is not the light-hearted hero like Spenser or Elvis Cole and the bad guy is not an amusing mobster like Joe Broz.Ex-cop Haftmann is a drinker, a gambler and mentally unstable. He's also on the trail of a serial killer that kills women who he picks up from swinger sites. Working with, but still hated, by the police and FBI we follow Haftmann's descent further into insanity on his hunt for the killer.The writing is dark and lyrical, gruesome details are not spared at all. The atmosphere unsettling. So, if you that Andrew Vacchs writes too light-heartedly and Spenser’s novels are too Disney for you, this is your book."

 

[Posted by Jochem Vandersteen in Sons of Spade].

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"There would appear to be a competition among crime writers to produce the most comfortably clichéd cop. You know the sort; difficult domestics, booze blues, world-weariness … and the inevitable redemption reveal, where our hero turns out to be misunderstood, to have a heart of gold and to spend his every waking hour dodging bullets, dodging booze and dodging brutality unbound so that he can help old ladies cross the street.

Thomas Haftmann is not like that. Not… exactly. In a crime writer competition to construct the most unlikeable hero, Thomas Haftmann wins. By a mile.

 

All the characters are finely drawn, and drawn with a sharp pencil, with excellent observation of the human head’n’heart. None of them is pure — purely good or purely bad — apart from the villain. That guy is stunningly scaring — consistently unpredictable and gratifyingly insane. Up there with Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, in fact.

The plot is good, the visuals exceptional and the dialogue romps along in the fine style. Everything a reader of the hard-boiled genre wants is here. I liked it so much that I bought the other two Haftmann novels, and am reading the next now.

More please . . ."

 

[posted by Frank Westworth, author of the J.J. Stoner novels, Dec. 4, 2019.

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