“Ed Earl Burch is a terrific hard-boiled character – a beaten up, beleaguered, boozing ex-cop who also happens to be one helluva detective.

In Jim Nesbitt’s THE BEST LOUSY CHOICE (the third in the series) Burch is still having nightmares from the near-brush with death in his last big case. Working as a private investigator in 1989 Dallas, he’s forced to take cases he doesn’t want to pay off a big debt to a shylock. One of them – which at first seems to be just a normal divorce case – quickly explodes into a tangled web of drug deals, real estate fraud, corruption, arson, betrayal and, of course, murder.

But the real story here is the violent uncompromising world of Ed Earl Burch’s Texas that Nesbitt writes about so eloquently and dramatically. It’s a tough world, but Burch is even tougher – an unorthodox lawman with a classic sense of justice who uses both his intelligence and brute force to beat the bad guys time and time again, no matter how badly the odds seemed to be stacked against him.

There’s lots of action, lots of tough dialogue and lots of people who die in this book – all in an endless quest for big money. Burch is one of the few left standing at the end. “I don’t have to worry about you shootin’ me…,” he says at one point, “I ain’t got no money.”

If you love that kind of attitude in a thriller (and I do!), you’ll want to read THE BEST LOUSY CHOICE and all Jim Nesbitt’s other Ed Earl Burch books too. Highly recommended!”

— R.G. Belsky, author of the Clare Carlson mystery series