Double Indignity: A Rex Koko, Private Clown Mystery (#2) by James Finn Garner

From the author of the international best-seller Politically Correct Bedtime Stories comes a new mystery genre: Clown noir!

In Top Town, a ghetto full of washed-up circus lifers in the shadow of a big city, audiences come every night for cheap thrills, both wholesome and not. Fire eaters perform for gin money. Gypsies reveal the future (and for a sawbuck can make it happen). Daredevils cheat Death time after time, but once. And witness to it all is one of the most loved and notorious figures in Top Town, a tough joey with a deadly past and a nose for picking all the wrong fights: Rex Koko, private clown.

In Double Indignity, Rex Koko is recruited to bring in a runaway lion, but has his shoe eaten in the process. Trying to get repaid for the expensive footwear, he runs afoul of drug-pushing quacks, alligator hypnotists, infantile mobsters, Amazonian witch doctors and blue-nosed moral crusaders trying to shut down Top Town. Before the second act, menace fills the air like the smells of popcorn, whiskey and fear. The South American jungle was never so dangerous as the tawdry streets of “The next best thing to a circus.”

It’s three rings of danger, suspense and more danger. As E.E. Cummings said, “Damn everything, but the circus!”

DOUBLE DIGNITY is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

 *****

“Wonderful! Like Raymond Chandler before him, Garner explores the seedy underbelly of show business. While Chandler showed us the truth about the heavyweights of the silver screen, Garner gives us a glimpse of the big shots of the circus world – a world of kinkers, joeys, flatties, ginks, bips, midgets and fat ladies.”
–Matt Walsh, Upright Citizens Brigade, Veep, The Hangover

“James Finn Garner shows us the wild breadth and dangerous, loopy depths of his imagination once again in Double Indignity. It’s bursting with memorable characters (both human and feline), whip-smart writing and innumerable jokes that come at you so fast and dead-on that you’re likely to wake up the morning after wondering what hit you. Fortunately, it’s fine new book, not a lion’s paw or a cop’s truncheon.”
–Christine Sneed, Little Known Facts, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry

 *****

James Finn Garner is best known for the international best-selling satire Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, as well as its sequels, Once Upon A More Enlightened Time and Politically Correct Holiday Stories. His latest project is the farcical “clown noir” mystery series starring Rex Koko, Private Clown. The initial book in this series — Honk Honk, My Darling — was named 2011 Book of the Year (Nontraditional Fiction) by the Chicago Writers Association.