From Fish Wrap To Hardcover

Chris Goffard, a recent Pulitzer finalist for a St. Petersburg Times series called The $40 Lawyer, just had his first novel, Snitch Jacket, published in the U.S. (It's been out in Great Britain for a while.) It's a real quick read, and some passages, like this one, jump right off the page:

So I was on my way to work, gliding down the hill out of Costa Mesa toward Pacific Coast Highway, and beyond it I could see the long silent blue of the Pacific, looking so big and friendly from this distance that it was possible to forget the sea was really a great salty puddle waiting to be nudged by an earthquake or asteroid into an annihilating hiccup. It gave me pleasure to think of the sea someday uncoiling its body vertically for a death-run at California. People say they love California, but it occurred to me that maybe everybody would like to see California destroyed, because it's the state Hollywood visits most with its Technicolor Armageddons by fire and water and bomb. I don't know why people should feel this way, except that everyone knows California sunshine is the world's loneliest light. Sailing down the hill, I found myself dreaming of possible apocalypses and of the battles royal I followed in the pages of The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Fantastic Four, where muscle-bound demigods yanked up city sidewalks for use as bullwhips and hurled buildings like javelins, the panels raining rubble, though no one ever seemed to die or raise the question of litigation.