“Fisson Chips” is quirky, madcap romp about a new PI having a very bad first day.  Gare Marx started a private investigating business with his partner Matthew Richardson.  When Gare shows up for work, the guy painting the sign on the door refuses to finish until he gets more money.  This starts a chain of events that ends with broken glass, spilled coffee, a body slam, and an unexpected meeting with an investor who want his money back.  That was the first chapter.

The pace is frantic, with lots of swearing and almost cartoon-like violence.  Everyone Gare meets seems to be out to get him or at least hostile, and everything that can go wrong, does.  To keep this review clean I’ll say Gare is a smart aleck.  He’s a motor mouth with a positive gift for getting on a person’s bad side.  He thinks he’s much smarter than everyone else he meets and seems to think that no one will understand his insults.  Either that or he likes pain.  It’s fun in small doses but after a few chapters I started feeling the same way I did when reading the Dresden Files – how can someone survive that much abuse and keep talking?  Why do they keep talking?

The story is written in first person present tense which adds to the immediacy and general surliness of the writing.  Each of the 10 chapters that I read added more unanswered questions and more odd characters.  On his first day as a PI Gare seems to have become his own first case.  Just why is everyone out to get him, where is his partner, and what money is the investor talking about?

I’d like to add a note about the site.  Navigation is via a scrolling table of contents to the left of the current chapter.  There are no Next or Previous buttons. 

If you’re looking for something light, silly and fast in the detective fiction genre, this is probably it.  The story is finished so you won’t have to wait for the next installment.  The author promises to continue Gare’s adventures in another “book”.  If you’re squeamish about your hero getting beat up and being confused most of the time,  this is probably not for you.

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If you’ve ever wanted to read a hard-boiled choose your own butt-kicking novel then Fission Chips is definitely for you.  In point of fact if you’re a fan of the hard boiled genre of fiction at all then you’ll probably enjoy this one.  It’s got everything, from the down-and-out private eye to the sassy secretary and the insurmountable mountain of problems.

I’ve read all six chapters and my only complaint would be that it seems to be moving slowly.  A lot is going on, and the action never slows, but we haven’t learned anything more about the protagonist’s main problem, why he’s in it or how he’ll solve it.

Aside from that no complaints, the writing is tight with few (if any) spelling/grammar mistakes, the site design is easy-to-navigate and the use of polls to involve readers in the story’s outcome is a rather ingenious use of the power of the interwebz.

If you enjoy pulp, noir, or stories about guys getting beat up several times a day, then I’d say definitely give this one a look see.

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