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    The Jacq of Spades: A Future Noir Novel
    The Jacq of Spades: A Future Noir Novel
    The Jacq of Spades: A Future Noir Novel
    Ebook295 pages7 hours

    The Jacq of Spades: A Future Noir Novel

    By Patricia Loofbourrow

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A boy vanishes. But not just any boy.

    1899 years after the Catastrophe, Bridges is owned by the Mob. As the city's steam-driven infrastructure fails, a new faction rises: the Red Dogs.

    Jacqueline Spadros is haunted by her best friend Air's death, killed as he tried to stop her sale to the Spadros crime syndicate ten years ago. Now in an unwilling marriage to the city's biggest drug lord, she secretly runs a small-time private eye business to earn enough money to escape.

    Air's little brother disappears from his back porch. And now someone is following Jacqui.

    Dark, gritty, psychological, multi-layered Victorian-inspired far future detective noir that keeps the reader guessing to the very end.

    The Jacq of Spades is part 1 of a 13-part serial novel:

    The Jacq of Spades
    The Queen of Diamonds
    The Ace of Clubs
    The King of Hearts
    The Ten of Spades
    The Five of Diamonds
    The Two of Hearts
    The Three of Spades
    The Knave of Hearts
    The Four of Clubs (coming October 2023)

    Scroll up, click to order, and buckle up!

    Welcome to the Family.

    Note: this story will be published in serial format on Royal Road.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPatricia Loofbourrow
    Release dateNov 11, 2015
    ISBN9781944223014
    The Jacq of Spades: A Future Noir Novel
    Author

    Patricia Loofbourrow

    Patricia Loofbourrow, MD is an SFF and non-fiction writer, PC gamer, ornamental food gardener, fiber artist, and wildcrafter who loves power tools, dancing, genetics and anything to do with outer space. She was born in southern California and has lived in Chicago and Tokyo. She currently lives in Oklahoma with her husband and three grown children.

    Read more from Patricia Loofbourrow

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    Reviews for The Jacq of Spades

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Jacqueline Spadros lives in Bridges and is married into a wealthy crime family. She runs a private investigator business on the side. When she was younger, her friend Air died and she is still haunted by this. When his little brother goes missing, she sets out to find him. I enjoyed this book. It was a good mystery and I loved the use of playing cards in the names. Jacqueline was a good character, she lives in a world where women are supposed to do as they are told, but she still tries to have her own life and help people through her business. I would recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      I love Victorian detectives like Sherlock Holmes! Jacqui is no Sherlock Holmes, but she is a delight, and the world that the author has created is as much a character as Jacqui. I love the creative quirks, like the fact that the four ruling families of Bridges are The Spadros, The Diamonds, The Clubbs, and the Harts. The way that each family has a unique look running about them. It is subtle and takes a moment to realize what the author is doing.

      Following Jacqui through the present case, which pulls on much of her past, and sets up greater events to come, is a breath-taking chase through the brilliantly blended world that the author created. I have to be honest, I don't think I have actually read steampunk before, but I have watched Steampunk anime, and have wanted to read steampunk books. The author ticks several boxes of what I understand to be steampunk, but it is not super technical (what left me afraid of reading steampunk for so long!) I am eager to read the next books in The Red Dog Conspiracy!

      The world feels very much like the dark underbelly of Victorian fashion and style, with a gritty mafioso vibe.
    • 3/5
      Really cool concept in a well-built world, but there was just a little too much.
    • 3/5
      There’s a lot going on in this book, maybe too much. Jacqueline (Jacqui) Spadros is married to Tony Spadros, the son of one of the ruling families of Bridges. She herself comes from the poor, the ‘Pot’. Jacqui has some sort of private detective business going on on the side, very secret. Then there’s a dangerous illegal drug, Party Time, going around. Plus there’s a missing boy. Then there’s the whole setting.Basically, I was intrigued by it all but had little time to figure one thing out before something else was thrown at me. The setting kept throwing me for a loop. It feels little historical, a little steampunky, a little dystopian. I like all those things but never got a firm grasp on what the domed city of Bridges was all about.Plenty of the characters held my interest. Of course, Jacqui is front and center. Now the tale does jump back and forth a bit, telling me in small snippets about Jacqui’s past. However, this confused me sometimes as to what was going on in the present. Jacqui has had all this training from Tony’s dad before she and Tony were married – everything from dressing like a lady to hand guns. She and Tony have been married for 3 years and it’s sometimes been good and sometimes not. I would have liked this story more if we had seen Jacqui in action more instead of simply being told what she can do.There’s Jacqui’s contacts and friends and family that are still in the Pot that add flavor to the tale. Her husband Tony isn’t as limited as he first appears to be. Tony’s dad is a right jerk and I look forward to seeing his demise (I hope) later in the series. Though I still feel like I missed something when it came to him lashing out at Jacqui’s maids.Jacqui’s secret private eye stuff felt over the top. We already have a lot going on in the story and then we toss this in. Jacqui references previous cases she’s solved but I kept wondering how she managed to do that plus keep it secret plus all the training she does for Family Spadros plus just being a lady, etc. I hope this side of her character gets filled out as the series goes forward.So all together, I wanted more from the story by trimming things down. I did enjoy it and I look forward to seeing where the series goes from here. 3.5/5 stars.The Narration: Machelle Williams was OK as the narrator. Her pacing is a bit slow. She does have a good voice for Jacqui. Her female voices were good but her male character voices were sometimes OK and sometimes they sounded like women. There were plenty of emotions in this story and sometimes Williams portrayed them well and sometimes her narration was a little stiff and dead. 3.5/5 stars.I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by Patricia Loofbourrow. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.
    • 4/5
      Bridge is an isolated domed city divided into four quadrants each of which is controlled by a crime family who manufactures and distributes a drug known as “Party Time”. Each of the four quadrants contains affluent areas, areas known as the “pot” which are areas of the city that were destroyed during previous warfare between factions, and the slums where the very poorest people live. The crime families establish the economic systems for their quadrants and large portion of the population are starving. Large scale poverty and continual competition and mistrust among the families make Bridge a proverbial powder keg for violence.One quadrant is ruled by the Spadros family. Jacqueline Spadros is the twenty-two bride of Spadros heir-apparent Tony Spadros. Jacqui was raised in the Spadros Pot in a brothel and she has a multitude of reasons to mistrust and detest Spadros patriarch Roy Spadros. She knows if anything happened to her husband, Tony, Roy would not allow her to continue as part of the family. Because of this, she has taken on a secret business of her own; that of private detective.When Jacqui is contacted by a woman whose son, David, has disappeared she is surprised to learn that she knew the woman many years earlier and that the death of her older son plays a key role in Jacqui’s nightmares. Although the woman does not recognize Jacqui at first, Jacqui cannot resist trying to find David for his mother, partly to ease her own guilt left over from the death of the older boy.What transpires is a mystery story of the first order in the best tradition of Sherlock Holmes. Jacqui is a young woman in a precarious position who must uphold a social image, deal with her husband’s and the family patriarch’s expectations, deal with inter-familial politics, run a household, find David and stay alive in her spare time. How she manages this is remarkable and makes a first-rate mystery story.All of the characters are believable and the reader is left satisfied up until the end. Unfortunately, this book is a serial series; the reader must throw in another nickel for the next installment to achieve any satisfaction as far as finding out who did it. I am not a fan of serial series and strike the names of authors who use that method off my reading list. This story, however, is well written and well edited. I noticed no textual errors to distract me from the story. The Jacq of Spades is an all-around excellent mystery story that should appeal to any lover of mysteries, crime action, or to fans of stories about life in dystopian cultures. The end is a letdown for those, like me, who think readers deserve to know who did it in the end. That of course is the nature of the serial series and that, alone, will cost it a star.

    Book preview

    The Jacq of Spades - Patricia Loofbourrow

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