THE LAST RESORT

A Lee Malone Adventure

by Pat Nolan

Deep in the redwood wilds along the Corkscrew River, someone is shooting neighborhood dogs. The year is 1985 and Lee Malone, former fashion model, queen of the runways from Paris to Milan, once dubbed the most beautiful woman in the world, now a part-time reporter for The Corkscrew County Grapevine, is looking for a story to sink her teeth into. When Lee finds the owner of Kelly’s Seaside Resort brutally murdered, it leads her on an adventure that includes a mysterious gray van, another murder, extortion, pornography, sex slavery, and a shadowy organization of militant feminists known as SAPHO.  In the process, Lee Malone’s notorious past catches up with her.
   THE LAST RESORTis a rollicking imaginative romp in the neo-pulp hard boiled genre told with the succinct directness of a Hammett, the witty hyperbole and lush locales of a Chandler, as well as a sly nod to Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys adventures.
Pat Nolan has written a fast paced, tongue-in-cheek, pun filled comedy of errors, misunderstandings, and faux intuition in the mode of a 1930’s pulp thriller.  THE LAST RESORT presents an unlikely set of circumstances in which a worldly-wise female reporter must untangle herself from her past in order to deal with the puzzling events of her present.  Instead of the typical splinter-jawed, broken nosed, tobacco breathed tough guy hero, Nolan upends the stereotype by introducing a gorgeous internationally famous former fashion model whose super power is her beauty.  Men are undone by her fatal charm, women not so easily.  Written as a serial over a five year period and audience-tested on a variety of readers, writers, litterateurs, poets, and lost souls, THE LAST RESORT, much like the Arabian Nights, features a labyrinthine plot, eccentric characters,  cliff-hanging chapter endings as well as the requisite exotica and phantasmagoria associated with the genre.  THE LAST RESORT, A Lee Malone Adventure, is a quirky, entertaining, and nostalgic take on the lurid screed that once peopled pulp pages on newsstands everywhere.  

  August 2012~ $19.99 ~ 212 pages ~ Paper~ ISBN 978-0-9840310-2-3

  Sample Chapters

         Chapter Six Runway Past     Chapter Twenty Two Naked Blade

Praise for The Last Resort

“Set in 1985 Northern California, The Last Resort is an audacious neo-pulp noir.  Lee Malone, an amateur sleuth, must operate sans the usual PI anonymity, for her scandalous past as celebrity model guarantees recognition. When her search for a murderer leads her into outback hustles and corporate rackets, some unsavory crimes, criminals and conspiracies are lying in wait.”
− Keith Abbott, Professor, Naropa University, and author of Downstream From Trout Fishing In America,  A Memoir of Richard Brautigan

“I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book.  I read The Last Resort slowly, savoring each chapter. . .allowing the previous chapter’s outrageous plot twist to settle in.  Pat Nolan was completely successful at suspending my disbelief. . . keeping things right at that edge.
— Peter Andrews, radio host of OFF THE SHELF on KGGV 95.1 FM  (read the entirety of Peter’s review)

“. . .chick lit for guys. . . .”
− anonymous correspondent

“Pat Nolan’s Last Resort puts his gun in the right hands–a woman’s–with authority and harmful intent.  Get ready to hit the deck!”
− Barry Gifford, author of Imagining Paradise and Wild At Heart

“. . .damned skillful and witty. . . zany plot offset by delicate descriptions of the coastal scenery and wonderful lances of wit about character types.”
− Eric Johnson, poet and master printer, Iota Press

“There’s an awful lot to praise about Pat Nolan’s new book THE LAST RESORT, but the top thing for me is the grace and fire and sheer fluency of Nolan’s prose. When I think of the current generation of so-called American master novelists, their prose (with maybe the exceptions of David Foster Wallace and Bill Vollmann) goes clunkety-clunkety-clunk. Nolan’s prose races past almost the whole lot of them like a Ducati on full throttle. Add to this the fact that he pulls off one of the most difficult feats for a fiction writer—a male writing convincingly from the point of view of a female—and that he captures the terrain, towns, and people of northern California better than I’ve ever seen them captured in print, and you’ll know why I literally couldn’t put the book down.”
− Gerald Nicosia, author of MEMORY BABE: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF JACK KEROUAC and HOME TO WAR: A HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM VETERANS’ MOVEMENT

A Unique Gift by An Obscure American Author for Someone Who Loves to Read but Just Ends
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