Blog Tour – Chop Shop By Andrew Post – Review

Welcome to Dark Reads stop on the Random Things Blog Tour for Chop Shop by Andrew Post. Thank you to Ann, and Flame Tree Press for inviting me to take part and providing me with an advanced reading copy for the Tour!

About The book

Amber Hawthorne and Jolene Morris, roommates and business partners at the Hawthorne Funeral Home,are drowning in debt. Because both young women have trouble keeping their partying habits in line, they start selling body parts on the black market to keep their business alive – and their new buyers seem friendly and trustworthy enough at first. That is until the dead gangster they’ve recently parted up turns out to have been full of disease.

Now Amber and Jolene’s buyers want something else to make up for lost profits, leaving the two undertakers to learn sometimes running your own business can cost you an arm and a leg. Literally.

• Paperback: 256 Pages
• Publisher: Flame Tree Press – 27th June 2019
• ISBN: 9781787582859

Dark Reads Review

You know when a book takes you completely by surprise? Well Chop Shop was one of those books for me. This is easily one of my favourite reads so far this year.

It reminded me of those early Guy Ritchie Crime Comedies (Lock Stock and Snatch – two of my favorite movies) with an extra helping of gore, awesome!

I wanted to point out, I wrote my review and Mentioned that this novel was reminiscent of early Guy Ritchie movies before I had read Andrews influences for the book. Dude, you hit the nail on the head there! Goal achieved!

The story follows two main perspectives –

One follows Frank a former doctor who has served some time inside and now works illegally ‘patching up’ unsavory patients from his home. I really liked Frank, he is a fundamentally good guy who is rubbing shoulders with lots of not so good guys. I really felt for the Doc, he is well an truly dropped in it which sets a deadly domino effect in motion.

The other follows Amber and Joline, friends who are running (into the ground) an inherited funeral home, these girls are desperately trying to stay afloat but are being weighed down by debt collectors and bailiffs…

Chop Shop is pretty gory, there were a couple of scenes I read with one eye shut! There are intertwining story lines and characters, a feud between Russian and Italian Mafia families and a look into the murky underworld of human body parts trafficking. This could have been a potentially confusing plot but Post controlled it perfectly, all of the different aspects of the story came full circle and slotted into place perfectly. I’m pretty sure I read a few of the pages towards the end of the book with my hand over my mouth!

So, what do you get when you cross rival gangs, an illegal doctor, a funeral home that is desperate for money and the Red Market? Yep you get Chop Shop!

Gory, savage and plenty of dark humor, I read it in no time. You NEED to read this book!

Pre-Order a copy directly from Flame Tree Press or from Amazon

Be sure to check our the previous bloggers on the tour!

About The Author

Andrew Post was born in Erie, Pennsylvania (imagine Eraserhead but in color). While he was honing his craft as a writer (those early stories were awful) he worked in a gift shop in one of the scuzziest hotels in the Midwest, he leaned rental cars (also gross), he was a butcher (despite being a vegetarian), and in 2013 his first novel, the cyberpunk thriller, Knuckleduster, was published. No one really seemed to care much but he kept at it and has since published a handful of other works to varying degrees of resulting public interest with a few seeing translations and one almost became a movie (that lit agent has since been fired).

For Chop Shop, Andrew was inspired by the (early) films of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie,and Martin Scorsese,as well as the deliberately over- the-top horror films of the 80s like Peter Jackson’s Braindead. That was the goal with Chop Shop: a comedic crime caper with buckets of gore.

Andrew lives in a sleepy river town in Minnesota where he may or may not be planning aquatic “accidents”to befall the many other authors who live in the area and he has been mistaken for Rob Zombie on no less than ten separate occasions.

You can check Andrew Post out on Goodreads and follow him on Twitter.