Dirty Sweet: A Mystery

Darleen R. Golke is a high-school teacher-librarian in Abbotsford, B.C.

On a busy Toronto street, real-estate leasing agent Roxanne Keyes
witnesses a shooting in broad daylight. After identifying the driver of
the getaway car as Boris, a Russian mobster, Roxanne decides to
blackmail him into renting space in her building for his strip club.
Before reeling in Boris, she hooks up with one of her tenants, Vince, an
ex-con who runs an Internet pornography business. She proposes using
Vince’s business to launder the proceeds from Boris’s criminal
enterprises. Of course, her plan encounters numerous obstacles before
the novel ends.

Dirty Sweet features a cast of deliciously seedy characters—Russian
mobsters, hookers and pimps, motorcycle gangs, shifty cops—all out for
easy money. Obviously heeding Elmore Leonard’s advice to “remain
invisible in your writing,” McFetridge peppers his prose with snappy,
often-profane dialogue. This fast-paced, hard-boiled crime novel sizzles
with sex, drugs, greed, ambition, and casual violence while maintaining
a delightful sense of the ridiculous.