Let There Be Linda – a Review

Colorful characters experience a week of hell while Los Angeles is baking in a heat wave where the temperature hovers around 107 degrees. The temperature isn’t the only disruption in LA though. Dead people and animals are coming back to life. Money disappears. A vicious giant shoves a cop’s face into a tank full of piranha.

Who are some of the characters that are the life of this story?

Danny and Mike Miller are brothers, but they don’t get along with each other. Their mom is about to die, and her dying wish is that Mike take care of Danny. Simple enough, right? There is never a good time for anyone to die, but their mother’s death comes at a very bad time.

Danny, a con-man who also runs a talent agency,owes a sadistic dwarf loan shark a large amount of money. And this dwarf’s best friend is an extremely loyal and rather vicious giant.

On an extremely hot day, a perverted pornographic clown with body odor and creepy makeup tries to get Danny to sign him on. After he leaves, very plain Jenny Stone comes in and claims she can breathe life back into dead things. Really?

Danny is skeptical that this girl can do what she says, and she leaves without a job. Before she leaves though, she breathes on his dead fern. And this is the beginning of those who were dead and gone being brought back to life. People will pay a lot of money to have their dead loved ones brought back, but is it really a smart thing to wake the dead?

Mike, Danny’s brother, is a mortuary accountant who feels uncomfortable around sick people. The sight of dead bodies makes him lose his lunch. Booted from his accounting firm the same day his mom dies, his income goes out the window. And he is being hunted by a crazy man who believes it is Mike’s fault that he lost all his money.

A coke-snorting dentist’s dog, Chachi, is thrown out of a car window by the vicious giant at the direction of the sadistic dwarf to whom the good doctor is way over his head in debt. And the dentist’s wife is driving him deeper into debt with her addiction to plastic surgery. The dentist pays Danny a lot of money to have Jenny bring Chachi back to life, but then the money disappears.

Mike and Danny have made a total mess out of their lives, and the only one who can help them is their mom, but she is dead. They need her to tell them what to do, so they retrieve her body and have Jenny breathe life back into her.

An LAPD detective, who is also a comedian, is investigating the death of Chachi, the poodle who was thrown out the car window. He never loses a chance to turn his investigations into jokes for his comedy routine while ignoring the law. When he sees life breathed into Chachi, he is convinced that his fortune has been made.

What could happen with this diverse cast of characters during a broiling LA summer when common sense leaves and tempers flare? This dark comedy horror thriller will have you laughing out loud at their antics.

Fans of Monty Python and Quentin Tarantino will love this character-driven book. I was sent a copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review. If you would like your own copy of Let There Be Linda, I have provided an Amazon link below.

Amazon link: Let There Be Linda

Recommended Article: Rich Leder Interview – Characters, Extreme Temperatures, and Self-Publishing

Favorite Sentences:
His creepy makeup—black eyes, red bloody nose, blue skin that made him look like a stone-cold corpse—would terrify a two-year-old birthday boy or even a twenty-two-year-old.

She looked like a plasticized human Halloween doll-woman fabricated by German scientists during World War II to scare the Allies into surrender.

Gary expected the Cat in the Hat to run around a corner, followed by Thing 1 and Thing 2.

He imagined that some San Fernando Valley housewife could hold a chicken in a pot, stand outside for a few hours, and then bring it inside and serve it for lunch.

New Words Learned:
ACLs – anterior cruciate ligaments

ancillary – subordinate

credenza – a closed cabinet for papers, office supplies, etc., often of desk height and matching the other furniture in an executive’s office

factoids – pieces of unreliable information believed to be true because of the way they are presented or repeated

goombah – a companion or associate, especially an older person who mentors or advises

macadam – a road surface made of compressed layers of small broken stones, esp one that is bound together with tar or asphalt

panoply – a complete or magnificent array

semi-aniline leather – leather that has a has a thin protective top coat added to protect it from wear and staining

Sisyphean – endless and unavailing, as labor or a task

supinated – turned so that the sole is facing upward or outward

Tanqueray – a London dry gin; it is so called because of its distillation process, as well as originating in Bloomsbury, London. London dry gin is made by means of double distillation of grain. Botanicals are added during the second distillation.
https://www.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=Tanqueray+definition

triptych – set of three

About the Author:
Rich Leder has been a working writer for more than two decades. His screen credits include 18 produced television films for CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark, feature films for Paramount Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures, and Left Bank Films, and four novels for Laugh Riot Press.

He has been the lead singer in a Detroit rock band, a restaurateur, a Little League coach, an indie film director, a literacy tutor, a magazine editor, a screenwriting coach, a PTA board member, a commercial real estate agent, and a visiting artist for the University of North Carolina Wilmington Film Studies Department, among other things, all of which, it turns out, was grist for the mill. He resides on the North Carolina coast with his awesome wife, Lulu, and is sustained by the visits home of their three children.