I just finished…

…”The Savage Professor” by Robert Roper. Bud, as I have known him for 40+ years, has authored several fine novels and notable non-fiction works. This, his first crime thriller, concerns a world-renown epidemiologist, who returns to his Berkeley hills home to find the nude, dead body of a former colleague/lover in his bed. And that is only the beginning of his corpse-rich problems. The ride through them includes a flurry of jabs at Berkeley places, personnages, and lifestyle quirks, several grizzly desecrations, and a stirring knife — well actually scalpel-vs.-straight-razor — fight. When I singled some of the more gore-soaked moments out for praise, he said, “You know, some of my readers thought I overdid things there.”

When you are talking to a guy who was recently singled out to review “Tad Martin vs. Popeye Rape-Whistle In: The Secrets of Corpse-Fucking,” you are not going to have that as a problem.