Lord Vishnu's Love Handles by Will Clarke

Here's a book that started out self-published, made it to commercial publication and deserves to be made into a movie too. It's a comedy, a thriller, a spy novel and just plain good fun to read.

Travis Anderson is your average schmuck - a dot-com millionaire living in a pretentious Dallas suburb with his wife and young son. Unfortunately, Travis has been cursed with an unusual gift; he gets psychic visions showing him all kinds of interesting (and often unpleasant) possibilities for the future. Travis copes with his unwanted visions by drinking almost constantly. When the IRS comes after him and his business partner for tax evasion, Travis discovers that his unique talent can save him and his family from financial ruin, and gets sucked into a secret organization of psycho paranormal spies who promise to fix his problems if he'll just do a little bit of work helping them. As you'd expect, he finds he's gotten way more than he bargained for and it's up to Travis to save his own sorry ass and fight to keep his family intact.

Lord Vishnu's Love Handles was difficult to put down; once the story got going, the pace kept picking up and I found I was waiting with increasing amusement to see what kind of wacky mess Travis would get into next. Travis is the kind of main character who wins you over even while you want to smack him, and the bizarre collection of people that he meets during his work as a psychic spy make the story even more readable. Highly recommended!

Isn't That Bigamy? by Mike Vogel

Since this book was one of the winners of POD-dy Mouth's 2005 Needle Awards (for those of you who don't feel like following the links, the site is a blog that offers reviews of books published through Print-on-Demand companies such as Lulu and iUniverse), I was expecting it to be good and I wasn't disappointed. Isn't That Bigamy? is a delightfully absurd suspense novel about a federal agent (Becky Li, who happens to be a lesbian with a gun fixation) forced to move to a remote town in Utah, posing as the wife of a witness she is protecting (Stan Smith, who happens to be a constantly horny heterosexual with a commitment problem). You see, Stan accidentally saw the head of an Armenian crime syndicate executing an undercover agent, and now the crime boss is not too happy with Stan and would prefer to see him dead - preferably before Stan can testify against him. To that end, he hires his favourite hit man, "Mad Dog" Moogalian (who happens to be a homophobic ex-wrestler who smokes Virginia Slims) to find Stan and eliminate him.

Unfortunately for everyone, Becky and Stan end up in the wrong town and find themselves caught up in the very weird polygamous subculture of Tamarin, Utah. I'm not sure that I need to say much more for you to understand why this book is so hilarious.

I hear that after winning the Needle Award, Mike Vogel found an agent to represent him, so I expect this book will be picked up by a major publishing house and available more widely in the next year or so. But if you feel really compelled to buy it before then, it's available through Amazon.