One Last Hit

The third Joe Portugal mystery - published 3/03 UglyTown trade paperback ISBN 0-9724412-0-4 $14.95 Read Chapter 1 View a bigger cover shot One Last Hit and the Who

Back in '68, they made killer music . . . now their music is killing them.

It's been three years since Joe Portugal has stumbled over any dead bodies. Three years during which he's continued to drift, living off what he makes acting in the occasional TV commercial, tending his plant collection, and trying to ignore the calendar. Three years since he began sleeping with his best friend Gina Vela and studiously avoiding any thought of what it means.

It's been ten times that long since Joe put his electric guitar away, and he's beginning to wonder if that might have something to do with his mid-life doldrums. Then Joe gets a chance to put the band he was in as a teenager back together. And maybe his life too. All he has to do is find the lead guitarist, who hasn't been seen since the 1970s. But when he starts to look, it's quickly clear that someone doesn't want to see a reunion tour ... someone who's very handy with a gun.

Joe's father Harold "The Horse" Portugal returns, as well as LAPD homicide detective Alberta Burns. And Joe finally gets to know some of the ever-changing parade of weirdos next door.

What's with this rock music stuff? What happened to the plants?

I wrote The Cactus Club Killings working on the write-what-you-know principle. I collected succulent plants, I needed a quirky avocation for my protagonist ... voilà. I expected Joe would continue to tend his collection (much like Nero Wolfe and his orchids), but I didn't intend to continue writing about plants - until the publisher bought the book as the first in a series of botanical mysteries. So I gave myself a quick course on orchids and followed up with Death of an Orchid Lover.

I was working on the third Joe book, The Petal Pushers, centering on the Los Angeles Flower Market, when my publisher suddenly and unceremoniously decided to drop most of their series mystery authors. Including me. I put the book aside and worked on other projects for a while, until one day I realized I missed Joe. My friends at UglyTown had already offered to put out the next book in the series, and I took them up on it.

Shortly after I started back in on The Petal Pushers, a new element crept into the story. Joe ran into a couple of guys from a band he was in as a teenager. Shortly after that, I realized I was much more interested in the music story than in the flower market one. So I cut all the old stuff and away I went.

Why rock music? I think it was some of that feeling-one's-mortality stuff. I suddenly missed the golden days of my youth. Cutting class to buy the White Album the day it came out. Lying on the floor in a friend's dope-hazed living room, listening to Beggars Banquet. Performing in a fraternity skit on a stage occupied later that evening by the Velvet Underground. Scoring first-three-rows seats at Fillmore East for Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Moby Grape, Procol Harum, Traffic. Walking twelve miles to get to Woodstock, where seeing the Airplane as the sun came up Sunday morning made up for being rooted in one spot for twenty-six hours straight.

As I continued to write, I discovered Joe's latest adventure had a special connection with the Who. More about One Last Hit and the Who.

From the November 3, 2003 mystery issue of Publishers Weekly ...

Lee Child, whose Persuader (Delacorte) was a New York Times bestseller, finds picking the winners a tough task. "There's a huge pool to choose from, and these things are always easier to judge in retrospect," he cautions, before recommending [two other books] and Nathan Walpow's One Last Hit (UglyTown) ("a perfect California mystery").

More reaction to One Last Hit ...

I thought it was extraordinary - just fabulous. Quite apart from the
plot and characters it had a terrific emotional quotient which all of us boomers should be eating up. Required reading for the Reacher Creatures.
                                    - Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series

Joe Portugal is an amateur sleuth with hardboiled aspirations. Although he talks like Raymond Chandler, he doesn't like guns, or violence, or danger. It makes him a very endearing and likeable protagonist. ... The plot kept me guessing to the end, the writing flows, and the dialogue in particular is excellent. In addition, there are some superb supporting characters.
                                      - reviewingtheevidence.com (review here)

Longtime Mystery Bookstore customers know that we're big fans of Nathan Walpow and his amateur detective, Joe Portugal. We're delighted to see Joe in a new adventure. One Last Hit is more than a traditional mystery - it's a book about rediscovering dreams and deciding which to let go.
                                    - The Mystery Bookstore, Los Angeles

Read a sample of One Last Hit

What This Mystery Is About ...
A fat, perfect joint ... midlife crises ... a Gibson SG ... fresh-squeezed orange juice ...
the girl who got away ... an eclectic after-hours club ... Julie Andrews ...
local television news ... breast reduction surgery ... grilled cheese sandwiches ...
the Berlin Wall ... a gruesome murder-suicide ... one VW Beetle after another ...
a girl's gun ... skipping the light fandango ... voice mail hell ... eBay ...
naked neighbors ... a high-speed chase ... a biker bar ... a shootout at the beach ...
cookie tins full of photographs ... a hideaway in the desert ... a ten-foot-tall peace symbol ...

People This Mystery Is About ...

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Last Updated: August 22, 2005