Publisher's Synopsis
Send a Monster to catch monsters!
The year is 1939 just after a massive Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. A serial killer is loose, leaving strange occult symbols on the foreheads of murdered young women. Adam Paradise works as a private investigator with an office over MORT'S drugstore on Fifth Avenue, but Adam also has a secret; he is almost two hundred years old, assembled from the parts of dead bodies by VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN! The reality of his existence became a legend and then a fictionalized book by Mary Shelley. After being abandoned in the Arctic by his creator, he spent many years in solitude educating himself. Now he has returned to the world of mankind and has allied himself with many of the downtrodden and outsiders of society. He is determined to try and understand humanity as well as to find out what his place is in the scheme of things. Adam's state of being-alive but created from the dead-gives him the ability to see the shadows of once-living beings-that some call ghosts-though he cannot communicate with them. In this case VANDOMA KALDERASH, a Romani, comes to Adam and asks him to recover a family heirloom, The KOSHTI BOK necklace that her brother used to cover a bet with a loan shark. It is reported to have occult powers. Things get complicated when the loan shark sells it to a fence who is then found hideously murdered. It soon becomes apparent the series deaths of the young girls are tied into the pursuit of many occult objects, including the Koshti Bok. Adam has his mismatched hands full as he tries to navigate a maze of deceit and murder that eventually leads him to a building in the Nazi summer retreat Camp Siegfried on Long Island. He finds himself in the middle of a conflict between evil vs. evil with the life of Vandoma in peril, in a battle that will determine the fate of the entire civilized world and may cost Adam the very humanity he so aspires to achieve. *** "No one but Teel James Glenn could bring us a protagonist quite like private eye Adam Paradise. A giant of a man, with a scarred body and a kind heart, Paradise is the quintessential outsider, and a keen observer of the human condition. He is also a man made from the parts of other men, a literal Frankenstein's monster. Working out of a second-story office, above a drug store in New York City in 1939, Paradise agrees to help a young Romani woman recover a family heirloom. As Paradise works the case, he is confronted by mobsters and Nazis, before coming up against an adversary even more imposing than Paradise himself. Glenn effortlessly crosses and combines genres, respecting and exploiting their tropes, to weave a story that is both familiar and at the same time brand spanking new. Not Born of Woman is a thoroughly entertaining read." - Jeff Markowitz "In Not Born of Woman Teel James Glenn proves a master of pulp crossed-genre mashups full of originality and verve. This book deserves some recognition." - Lee Murray, multiple Bram Stoker Award(R) winner and Shirley Jackson Award winner "An original and ingenious gumshoe epic, Not Born of Woman is what would happen if Raymond Chandler and Mary Shelley had a baby that went on to play Sam Spade on the silver screen. The characters jump off the page, and the story moves faster than a bolt of lightning racing down a laboratory lightning rod. Paradise Investigations is going to be the next series everyone is talking about. It's smart, sharp, and authentic, but most of all ... it's alive!" - Nicholas Kaufmann, bestselling author of The Hungry Earth and The Mind Worms
