Bressio

A New York investigator risks his life to look into shady activity at a downtown loft. If only he'd listened to his mother and become a mob enforcer instead . . .   Tipping the scales at 240 pounds, Alphonse Joseph Bressio is a big man in New York's legal investigation biz, though he'd rather be doing almost  anything else. If he had heeded his ample gut's feeling and refused a powerful lawyer's request to help out the paranoid ex-girlfriend of middle-age, drug-dealing loser L. Marvin Fleish, Bressio could have spared himself a headache bigger than his appetite and gambling problem combined. But his soft heart got the best of him. Now the portly PI is running afoul of local mobsters, overzealous federal narcs, and blue-blooded ex-government functionaries by looking too closely into strange doings at a downtown loft that the cops aren't talking about, despite the unusual number of corpses that seem to be connected to it. Bressio is starting to think it would have been less hazardous to his health and sanity if he had followed in his father's footsteps and become a Mafia enforcer. At least it would have made his mother happy.   From Richard Ben Sapir, cocreator of  The Destroyer series, comes a wild and woolly, tongue-in-cheek take on the hardboiled detective novel. Sapir's  Bressio is a nonstop delight, frenetic and funny with a truly outrageous cast of anti-heroes, detestable villains, hard-luck bystanders, and arguably the most endearingly unforgettable protagonist ever to grace the pages of noir crime fiction.