Bloodthirsty (Lomax and Biggs Series #2) »

An award-winning former advertising executive, MARSHALL KARP is a playwright, a screenwriter, and has written and produced numerous TV shows. Having paid his dues in Hollywood, he began killing the people he used to work with. His first novel, The Rabbit Factory, set in a Disneyesque studio, introduces LAPD Detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs.

Barry Gerber, one of the most hated men in Hollywood, is a no-show for a red carpet event. The next morning he turns up dead, killed in such a bizarre way that neither Detectives Mike Lomax nor Terry Biggs nor anyone in Forensics has ever seen anything like it before. Two days later, the prime suspect — another despised show-business bad boy — is found murdered in the same sadistic manner.

The list of suspects then becomes as long as the credits in a summer blockbuster. Everyone hated the murdered men. Biggs jokes that this could be an elaborate public service effort to make Hollywood a better place to live and work. But he and Lomax soon find that all jokes are off as they wade through a daunting number of leads to uncover who will be the next victim. What they stumble upon is a motive far more primal than they had ever imagined.

Fast-paced, razor-sharp, and intensely funny, Bloodthirsty reunites Lomax and Biggs — the mystery genre’s new dynamic duo.

Publishers Weekly

Karp's second comic police thriller (after 2006's The Rabbit Factory), set in the glitzy world of Hollywood moguls and wannabes, is an uneven blend of gallows humor and gore. When mega-producer Barry Gerber turns up drained of blood in a trash can, LAPD detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs, who had been hoping to enter a deal with the victim for a movie adaptation of one of their high-profile cases, are assigned to investigate. Their workload doubles when the A-list star of Gerber's last blockbuster, actor Damian Hedge, is abducted, apparently by the same person responsible for the producer's murder. Karp intersperses Lomax's snappy first-person narration with scenes from the criminal's perspective, eliminating most of the mystery and making the motive for the crimes obvious early on. Though brisk and cynical, this depiction of Tinseltown falls short of the standard set by Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty. (May)