Shotgun Alley further illuminates our heroes’ characters. This time Bishop goes undercover in a motorcycle gang, to rescue a girl who ran off with them – the beautiful daughter of a wealthy, aspiring politician. Once again, the plot is motivated by romantic obsession, the things men and women will do for love, or lust, or whatever they conceive as love.

Each character, no matter how good they are at what they do, is searching for something more. For most of them, it’s love, a dream of love as romantic and mystic as any poem by Shelley or Keats. It’s the juxtaposition of this extreme romanticism with the gritty world of hardboiled detective fiction that makes these books shocking and unforgettable. A bloody, bullet-riddled kind of incarnation.

I love these books. I think that, regardless of all the great stuff Andrew Klavan has written – and continues to write – the Weiss and Bishop trilogy will stand as a classic for a (hopefully) wiser generation of future readers and critics.

Cautions for very gritty, adult themes, and a whole lot of dirty words.