Blood Standard (Isaiah Coleridge Novel): 1

Laird Barron has so much fun with this character, who admires Humphrey Bogart's take on Sam Spade and tosses off one-liners that bring the spirit of Dashiell Hammett into the 21st century. --Raleigh News & Observer

The action is fast-paced, the characters well drawn, the settings vivid and the hardboiled prose quirky in the manner of a writer who cut his teeth on horror and poetry. --Associated Press

Singular and excellent . . . BLOOD STANDARD sets a standard that will be hard to match. --criminalelement.com

Massive, scarred Isaiah is a thug's thug, but he's also a well-read student of mythology. He's indifferent to stab wounds and generates righteous mayhem in his quest. Fans of violent crime fiction will love this one and will be eager to hear more from Isaiah. --Booklist (starred review)

Laird Barron's Blood Standard is stylish, witty, and stupendously entertaining, and it gives us a main character--Isaiah Coleridge, head-cracking classics-quoting half-Maori ex(ish)-gangster--who is entirely unforgettable. --Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone

Rendered in icy strokes of prose, Laird Barron's Blood Standard is a remarkably self-assured crime novel--at once explosive and intimate, with a tightly wound plot and wonderfully realized characters. And then there's Barron's hero, Isaiah Coleridge. He's got a dead dog named Achilles and bits of Beowulf on his breath and in his teeth. Needless to say, there's not too many like him. --Michael Harvey, author of Brighton and The Chicago Way