“Set in 1979 in the savage, seedy bars and back alleys of Vancouver’s fearsome Eastside, Zero Avenue is a tough, edgy crime novel focused on a female singer’s struggle to stop being the dope-running girlfriend of a powerful drug dealer and position her band to ride the wave of the emerging punk music scene.”
This is the fifth novel by Canadian crime fiction writer Dietrich Kalteis whose debut novel Ride the Lightning won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 2015. Before writing novels, Kalteis was a finalist in the Los Angeles Screenplay Festival and his short stories were widely published in a variety of familiar literary venues, including the magazine Lowestoft Chronicle.
Littered with references to the sounds and significant singers of the era, his newest work explores the harsh, gritty life of hopeful musicians trying to achieve their ambitions but caught up in the world of gangland violence where theft, bloodshed and drug trafficking are a part of their everyday lives.
Frankie Del Rey, singer and guitarist with small-time band Waves of Nausea, is front and centre in this hard-hitting, high-energy story. Tough and resilient, she lives in an area of Vancouver where chicks carry knives, punks travel in groups for safety, winos are beaten for pocket change, and an old age pensioner is ‘robbed of his dentures.’
Kalteis, who is rapidly becoming one of Canada’s top modern crime writers, follows his previous successes with another snarling, fist-swinging, gangland drug tale that is bristling with ambition, desire, hate and brutality. This one is made all the better by its raging hot, kick-ass front woman, who likes to party hard, fight hard and bring the house down.”
Read my review of his latest book, Zero Avenue, today in the Lancashire Evening Post, and syndicated to 25 newspapers across the UK.
