Paying for It -- Tony Black

If you've been looking for a private-eye who can keep up with Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor when it comes to drinking and taking punishment, you'll want to grab this book right now.  It's the first in a series about Gus Dury, once a journalist, now a guy who's drinking his way into oblivion while trying to avoid signing divorce papers.  The setting is Edinburgh, mostly the really mean streets, which is appropriate because this is a really mean book.

Dury was a drinker before he lost his job (thanks to a slight accident that wasn't really his fault), but losing his position really sends him into the bottle.  When a friend's son is murdered (the cops call it suicide), the friend hires Dury to look into it.  Almost from the start, Dury is told that he'd be much better off doing something else because the people he's about to get involved with are harder and more ruthless than he can imagine.  Dury doesn't really believe this, but he finds out the hard way that he should have.  When it comes to the end, Dury's found out what he wanted to know, but it comes at a big price.  This one's hard and fast, leavened with humor black as midnight.

New Pulp Press hasn't been doing reprints up to now, but they've found someone whose books fit right in with the bleak, tough novels they're known for.  They've also published Gutted, the second book in the series.  Check 'em out.