The Painted Gun

2018 Shamus Award Finalist: A “tricky and delightfully surprising crime novel” set at the dawn of the digital age in San Francisco (Publishers Weekly).

It’s 1997, and the dotcom boom is going strong in San Francisco. But ex-journalist and struggling alcoholic David “Itchy” Crane's fledgling “information consultancy” business is getting slowly buried by bad luck, bad decisions, and the growing presence of the Internet. Before he can completely self-destruct, a private investigator offers him fifty grand to find a missing girl named Ashley. Crane takes the job because the money’s right and because the only clue to her disappearance is a dead-on oil portrait of Crane himself—painted by the mysterious missing girl whom he has never met.

As Crane’s search for Ashley becomes an obsession, he stumbles upon a series of murders, for which he begins to fear he's being framed...

“Spinelli deftly segues from one genre to another—from hard-boiled noir to paranoid thriller, puzzle mystery (with each and every riddle logically explained), spy caper, and ultimately to something evocative of Bogart and Bacall. Spinelli is definitely a talent to watch.”—Publishers Weekly

“A neat little post-modern mash-up of Chandler and Hammett...[Spinelli’s] got wit and style up the wazoo.”—Thrilling Detective

“The Painted Gun is hardboiled like they don’t make anymore. Whiplash twists, razor-sharp prose, an addictive narrative—I couldn’t read it fast enough.”—Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse