About the Book

In David Gordon’s diabolically imaginative new thriller, The Bouncer, nothing and no one is as expected—from a vial of yellow fragrance to a gangster who moonlights in women’s clothes.

Joe Brody is just your average Dostoevsky-reading, Harvard-expelled strip club bouncer who has a highly classified military history and whose best friend from Catholic school happens to be head mafioso Gio Caprisi. FBI agent Donna Zamora, the best shot in her class at Quantico, is a single mother stuck at a desk manning the hotline. Their storylines intersect over a tip from a cokehead that leads to a crackdown on Gio’s strip joint in Queens and Joe’s arrest—just one piece of a city-wide sweep aimed at flushing out anyone who might have a lead on the various terrorists whose photos are hanging on the wall under Most Wanted. Outside the jailhouse, the Fed and the bouncer lock eyes, as Gordon launches them both headlong into a nonstop plot that goes from back-road gun show intervention to high-stakes perfume heist and manages to touch everyone from the CIA to the Flushing Triads. Beneath it all lurks a sinister criminal mastermind whose manipulations could cause chaos on a massively violent scale.

For readers who like a heavy dose of fun with their murder, this is crime fiction at its freshest, from a virtuoso of the “darkly comic, stylish literary thriller” (Associated Press).

Praise for The Bouncer

“The Bouncer is a tour-de-force, ranging from underworld crime to a unique caper and a terrorist plot. David Gordon brings an outstanding new voice to the contemporary crime novel.”—Robert Crais, bestselling author of The Wanted and other Elvis Cole novels

“David Gordon’s The Bouncer is a treat—a hard-edged thriller that makes you feel good while you’re reading it. Give it to someone. They’ll thank you.”—Thomas Perry, New York Times bestselling author of The Bomb Maker

“Fast, funny and tough, David Gordon’s The Bouncer will toss you over his shoulder like King Kong and carry you away.”—Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition

Praise for David Gordon

“Funny, with a satirical edge, and unlike some literary authors who play with genre, Gordon knows how to write a potboiler . . . An impressive debut.”—Los Angeles Times, on The Serialist

“An irreverent and funny twist on the classic whodunit—the kind of pulp-fiction mystery that made the careers of such writers as Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett.”—GQ.com, on The Serialist

“Gordon’s sentences are crisp and often jarring. His plots unspool in strange, sometimes disturbing ways . . . enjoy the disorientation and to trust that you’re in the hands of an earnest storyteller.”—Paris Review Daily, on White Tiger on Snow Mountain

“I have rarely come across a writer in such command of the English language. His sentences, characterizations and set pieces are things of beauty.”—Washington Independent Review of Books, on Mystery Girl

“David Gordon has gathered up our cultural trash and made of it something magnificent. In the tradition of Bolano, Chandler, and lots of dime novels that most of us pretend to know nothing about, The Serialist makes high art out of serial murders, pornography, soup dumplings and pulp fiction. I adore this book!”—Rivka Galchen, on The Serialist

“David Gordon has written a passionate love story disguised as a mystery, a brainy tragicomedy, a bildungsroman wherein ‘the gumshoe learns the shocking secret of himself.’ His prose is by turns salacious, uproarious, and happily unhinged. A total delight.”—Karen Russell, on Mystery Girl

“Part mystery, part love story, wholly delightful.”—Bustle, on Mystery Girl