Drew Parker
Created by Keith Hartman

A ballsy, audacious mish-mash of sci-fi, police procedural, political satire, horror, gay and detective fiction, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse (1999) was a first novel that somehow managed to ignore most of the dictums of the genres it poached, and still succeed.

In 2025, Atlanta, Georgia is a segregated hellhole divided along religious and sexual preference lines, where witches, Jews, demons, Christians, militant Native Americans, fundamentalist Baptists, vampire sex cults and people with an astounding number of assorted agendas and differing sexual preferences all co-exist -- not always easily.

DREW PARKER is a gay private eye tossed into the middle of it all, who gets drawn into the search for what appears to be a Satanic serial killer, and before it's all over he and his Wiccan partner Jen will have run into Christian rockers, crooked politicos, A Cherokee drag queen, a sexually confused teenager, assorted Wicans, and a mystery group of men in suits. The barbs fly thick and fast, and generally hit their mark, but even more amazingly is that first-time novelist Hartman managed to make it all work.

And then did it all again a few years later with the sequel, Gumshoe Gorilla.

UNDER OATH

• "The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse is, like it's title, a somewhat busy book, but there's enough payoff in characterization, story, and ideas to make the trip through its pages a real pleasure."
  -- Charles de Lint, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1999
  

NOVELS

• The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse (1999)...Buy this book...Kindle it!
• Gumshoe Gorilla (2001)...Buy this book...Kindle it!
  

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.