Book Review:Long Lost Dog of IT by Michael Kazepis

Long Lost Dog of It by Michael Kazepis

Paperback, 250 pages

Published April 2nd 2014 by Broken River Books

From the Back Cover: “June 5th, 2011. The streets of Athens are draped in a thick fog of tension. Hundreds of thousands of activists line the streets to protest the bankrupt government's austerity measures. Riot police patrol the crowd and set up barricades across key intersections.

A toothless vagrant scrambles to stay ahead of his past, a young couple struggles to piece their relationship back together, and a killer realizes too late that his number is up. Over the course of 48 hours, they will navigate a labyrinth of sex shows and dive bars, mob fronts and punk shows, fighting both their inner demons and the very real demon stalking the streets with a machine gun in his bag: a sociopathic hitman dressed to the nines and obsessed with JFK.”

Political climate, punk rock in a foreign exciting setting, A serial killer and a hard boiled narrative. Yep all there and then some.

I really like hearing author's read their work live. I like to hear the artist telling the story in their own voice. Often that will sell me on reading a book or checking out an author. I might not have been interested in before. I was lucky enough to see Kazepis read from this novel twice. Once at the Hour That Stretches reading series in Portland, and once at the World Horror Convention. In this case it served to personalize the experience for me. I saw the author in every page of the book.

That can sometimes be a negative, but it was a strength in this case. The Long Lost Dog of it is a book about a time and place. It is almost entirely world building. It is clear it was a time and place Kazepis was trying to capture and he did a fantastic job of doing that.

It's strength is a a gritty crime setting think Elmore Leonard, but way more weird and bizarro world of the Greek underground scene. I can't tell you if it is a realistic look, as I never hung out there but the author did. The best thing I can about this novel is it felt like a place I had been to by the end of it. This was a setting Kazepis spent time in. Junesong the main female character was most vivid to me.

The plot is twisting and some times hard to follow but well worth it. I can tell you there is nothing like it for me to compare it too. That said it might not be for everyone. You like well written weird crime I think you’ll be happy.