The Painted Gun — Bradley Spinelli

It's 1997 at the dawn of the digital age in San Francisco. Ex-journalist and struggling alcoholic David "Itchy" Crane's fledgling "information consultancy" business is getting slowly buried by bad luck, bad decisions, and the growing presence of the Internet. Before he can completely self-destruct, a private investigator offers him fifty grand to find a missing girl named Ashley. Crane takes the job because the money's right and because the only clue to her disappearance is a dead-on oil portrait of Crane himself--painted by the mysterious missing girl whom he has never met. As Crane's search for Ashley becomes an obsession, he stumbles upon a series of murders for which he begins to fear he's being framed...

With pitch-perfect dialogue, an exquisitely crafted plot, and a stylized, deadpan nod to classic hard-boiled writers like James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, and Dashiell Hammett, THE PAINTED GUN introduces Bradley Spinelli as a force to be reckoned with in contemporary noir fiction.