Last Call At The Nightshade Lounge

I picked up Last Call At The Nightshade Lounge in a bargain basement sale on Amazon because I liked the title and the premise, but unfortunately that was all I ended up liking, as the writing by Paul Krueger was amateurish and at times painful to read.

The premise is that bartenders in Chicago moonlight as monster hunters, endowed with powers by drinking magic cocktails (a screwdriver gives great strength, a martini invisibility, etc.). A young woman, Bailey Chen, gets a job as a barback in the title watering hole through her friend Zane, on whom she still has a crush. Quickly she learns that hairless demons called Tremens roam the streets, and the bartenders, also called The Alechemists (ugh) are all that keep the monsters from overrunning the city.

That's a clever premise, and interspersing the chapters are recipes for cocktails from "The Devil's Water Dictionary." If anything else, Last Call At The Nighshade Lounge can be used as a guide to making basic cocktails. "It is the position of The Devil’s Water Dictionary that almost all which humanity deems impossible can be achieved—with the liberal application of alcohol."

The book has several problems. I was never sure what these Tremens were, or where they came from. Also, the dialogue is putrid--hardly a sentence spoken seemed authentic. Krueger is clearly a person who loves the romanticism of bars, and probably makes a mean cocktail, but the writing is slapdash.

I do give him props for making his protagonist a Chinese-American female, when he could have easily just centered it around another white male. But aside from that, I pretty much hated this book.