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Gun Machine
On sale
3rd January 2013
Price: £9.99
This morning Detective John Tallow was bored with his job.
Then there was this naked guy with a shotgun, and his partner getting killed, and now Tallow has a real problem: an apartment full of guns. Old guns. Modified guns. Arranged in rows and spirals on the floor and walls. Hundreds of them.
Each weapon is tied to a single unsolved murder. Which means Tallow has uncovered two decades’ worth of homicides that no one knew to connect and a killer unlike anything that came before.
Tallow’s bosses don’t want him to solve the case. The murderer just wants him to die. But there’s a pattern hiding behind the deaths, and if Tallow can figure it out he might even make it out alive.
Then there was this naked guy with a shotgun, and his partner getting killed, and now Tallow has a real problem: an apartment full of guns. Old guns. Modified guns. Arranged in rows and spirals on the floor and walls. Hundreds of them.
Each weapon is tied to a single unsolved murder. Which means Tallow has uncovered two decades’ worth of homicides that no one knew to connect and a killer unlike anything that came before.
Tallow’s bosses don’t want him to solve the case. The murderer just wants him to die. But there’s a pattern hiding behind the deaths, and if Tallow can figure it out he might even make it out alive.
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Reviews
Hellish fun
A mad police procedural just north of the border of dark fantasy. Delightful.
GUN MACHINE never lets go of the reader and never flags in its relentless pace. In the course of 300 tightly wound pages, Ellis unloads a full clip of ideas, black humor, character, and copper-sheathed action scenes. Every sentence is a bullseye.
Underneath the pyrotechnic prose lies a perfectly paced mystery thriller. Ellis gets it so right.
Sharp, dangerous, beautifully observed... Some things about Warren Ellis's writing never change, including - I imagine - his ability to make even maniacs worry that they're boringly sane.
GUN MACHINE is packing heat: wonderfully demented misfits, killer dialogue, a helluva story. Warren Ellis is a twisted genius and this is his grittiest, sexiest, and best work by far.
GUN MACHINE redraws the crime map of Manhattan; Ellis's bizarre, febrile imagination and mordant wit makes a serial killer thriller for a new century.
A magnificently entertaining gun held to the head of the crime thriller genre
GUN MACHINE sees Ellis grab hold of the mainstream by its windpipe and demand acceptance; a perfectly flawless crime book with a feral glint in its eye.
If only other police procedurals had half the gumption and imaginative power of this novel
A dazzling oasis in the desert of grimly identical police procedurals
Sick, slick and very funny...[Ellis] doesn't need pictures to create his gripping, grave new world
[Ellis] turns to conventional crime fiction with startling success...powerful writing and vast imagination
Ellis tackles the police procedural, although it's bloodier and more intriguing than any episode of Law & Order or CSI, and arms it with gallows humor, high-tension action scenes and an unlikely hero
Just about everything in GUN MACHINE, Warren Ellis's dark but pleasingly quirky crime thriller, is a little bit off, not quite what you'd expect...In his way Tallow is almost as weird as the hunter, and yet he's also oddly endearing, so single-minded you can't help rooting for him.
Never stops to draw breath. It's a monster of a book, bowel-looseningly scary in places, darkly uproarious in others, and remorseless as the killer who hunts in its pages...particularly good, even by the high standards of a Warren Ellis tale