Steroid Blues (Fogarty-Tanaka Series) - Softcover

La Plante, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1499265506 ISBN 13: 9781499265507

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

John Winston Flint, prominent Philadelphia physician, has been systematically tortured to death. Every bone in his body has been shattered—even the joints of his fingers and toes reduced to powder.

The doctor’s hidden side is revealed when a police search turns up a collection of sadomasochistic videos in which Flint himself was the star performer—and horrifyingly, one shows a brutal rape and apparent murder.

Fogarty and his friend and colleague, medical examiner Josef Tanaka, also discover that Flint was selling massive quantities of illegal steroids to hardcore bodybuilders. In a world where total physical prowess is the ultimate goal, and strength truly equals power, performance-enhancing chemicals are more than worth their weight in gold.

Nothing in Fogarty’s experience has prepared him for this case, where each secret he uncovers seems to lead him farther from the truth, and where the darkest secret of all is written in the blood of two drug-enhanced, steroid supermen.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard La Plante began his working life as a special education teacher in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he spent a great deal of time playing the guitar and working on songs to the amusement of his students. Following his dismissal, he formed the rock band Revenge and toured and recorded till egos clashed and noses were broken.

His first book, Tegné: Soul Warrior, a fantasy-fiction novel, combined his longtime study of Japanese martial arts with his interest in metaphysics and love of adventure tales.

He wrote a sequel to Tegné, entitled The Killing Blow, then switched from fantasy-fiction to hardcore thrillers with a popular series featuring the characters Josef Tanaka, a Japanese-American medical examiner and shotokan karate master, and Bill Fogarty, an Irish-American police Lieutenant. Mantis was the first novel in the series, followed by Leopard, Steroid Blues, and Mind Kill.

A great deal of the money earned from his books ended up in the chrome and steel accessories that adorned his custom Harley-Davidson, a 1989 Springer, an obsession which became the inspiration for his motorcycle memoir, Hog Fever. Detours, written in 2002, continues the motorcycle theme and traces a solo cross-country journey ending in Sturgis, the famous motorcycle rally in the black hills of South Dakota.

Richard and his second wife, Betina, an accomplished photographer and mother of his two sons, built their first home from the ground up on a bluff overlooking Gardiner’s Bay in East Hampton, New York.

In 2004, the family moved to Ojai, a small town in the high desert of Southern California, where they built their dream home on a mountaintop, inspiring his latest memoir, Never Again.Richard’s other interests include anything paranormal, western boxing, and competitive swimming.

From Publishers Weekly:

Philadelphia police detective Bill Fogarty and forensic pathologist Josef Tanaka are back in another volatile mixture of sadism and suspense from LaPlante (Mantis; Leopard). A local doctor is discovered dead in S/M gear, every bone in his body broken; in his closet, the police find a videotape that shows two men torturing, raping and possibly killing a masked and bound woman. One of the men is the dead physician, and Fogarty strongly suspects the other is Horst Nickles, white-supremacist body builder, gym owner and peddler of illegal steroids. When a shady videographer is murdered, grotesquely impaled on his camera tripod, Fogarty becomes convinced that Nickles is the killer. When Fogarty learns that body-builder Jack Dunne, brother of the videotaped woman, is bent on revenge, the narrative spins into a triangular stalking game as Dunne, Nickles and Fogarty head to a spectacular and gory climax. LaPlante's quick-cutting speeds the action along, albeit often at the expense of characterization, and pumped-up, steroid-crazed heavies provide more than enough menace. Sharp-eyed readers may guess the plot's wild climactic twist early on; even those who don't are more likely to be annoyed than wowed. Still, the relentless pace and grim action should satisfy most La Plante fans. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1499265506
• ISBN 13: 9781499265507
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 280