This is the first of Lansdale's Hap and Leonard novels, and a book that was immensely influential on me. In fact, a whole lot of my influences coalesced around Savage Season in a brilliant, liberating moment of insight to do with story and craft and style, and it will always have a special place in my heart. Brilliant to go back and reread and discover that, if anything, it's better than I remember.

Hap and Leonard and their huge personalities and their physical presences and their fierce moral convictions and bone-headed loyalty are like the muscle and blood and swinging fists of this book. Intelligent but profane, romantic but crude, lying in the dirt but pissing at the stars, they are defiantly poor and unswervingly honourable and they do not have time for your bullshit.

Well, Hp might have some tome for your bullshit if you're an attractive ex who keeps his heart on a string. Trudy shows up and asks for help, a little treasure hunt that needs Hap's expertise with a nice payoff at the end. Hap agrees and drags a reluctant Leonard along as wingman, and soon they're diving in icy river waters at the behest of a a small group of radical sixties refugees. Things do not go smoothly. There is much death and violence, nasty, nasty violence before the end.

It's a perfect, tight, darkly comic, frequently brutal, eye-poppingly vulgar read. A brilliant, blood-soaked thriller with a cynical heart of gold.