Life is short. And it’s about to get a lot shorter for a pack of high-life Savannah sex club swells, a crooked DA, a bent cop, a cold-eyed black ops killer and a merciless millionaire with a dirt-poor secret.

Why? They’ve backed SPD Detective Tate Drawdy into a corner with a trumped-up murder charge, threatened his family and friends, killed his neighbor and given him a powerful motive for remorseless revenge.

Big mistake. Big thrill for readers of Michael Ludden’s latest action-packed Drawdy adventure, “The Street King”.

The sex club is the nexus for murder, corruption, gunrunning, blackmail and the sudden fear that strikes when the carnal games get bloody. Everybody in the club is having nasty fun on the down-low until Jonathan Leasure, a wealthy trucking magnate and one of the founding members, gets murdered in a burglary gone bad.

The killer is Lonnie Gertz, an ace second-story man who has never killed before. He finds a file with a ledger listing the members and their partners and steamy photos of people with partners who aren’t their husbands or wives.

Smelling money, he figures to tap a few members for some quick bucks but doesn’t realize what a bad move this truly is until he loans his truck to a handyman who has his head blown off in a shotgun drive-by. It’s a botched hit and Lonnie’s on the run from an ex-military assassin working for a powerful financier whose lust for money knows no bounds.

Drawdy gets the Leasure case and quickly runs into a dead end — until the drive-by. Then he’s one step behind the assassin, who quietly tracks down Gertz to a Tybee Island hideaway and kills him as the burglar is taking a nighttime stroll on the beach.

Somebody wants Drawdy off the case. Terminally. A naturally violent man who never dodges trouble, Drawdy had rescued a woman being accosted on the street by three thugs. One of the thugs drew a knife on Drawdy, who killed him with a chop to the throat.

Nobody on the force thinks this is anything other than a righteous kill — not Drawdy’s boss and close friend, Jimmy Patterson, nor the chief. But the district attorney, a member of the sex club, files murder charges against Drawdy after a witness comes forward who claims to have seen Drawdy initiate the attack and kill the man.

The murder charge stinks to high heaven. It gets filed right after Drawdy visits the home of the wealthy financier with the taste for illegal loot, roughs up the butler and scares the man’s wife. The sudden appearance of a witness has the scent of someone bought and paid for.

Drawdy turns himself in, but not before following the chief’s order to visit the most powerful defense attorney in town, Hunt Van Dine, to put on retainer. Drawdy can afford to do this because he’s the son of a very rich Atlanta attorney and well-to-do mother who expected him to become a lawyer or a doctor — not a cop.

What Drawdy doesn’t expect is his father to show up at his door and insist on leading his son’s defense team, with his mother in tow to keep an eye on her aging and frail husband. Drawdy is denied bond and while in jail survives an attempted hit when an inmate he befriended inexplicably steps up and takes the shiv meant for the young detective.

That sets a hard and deadly line between Drawdy, his family and friends and the cops in his corner on one side and the financier, crooked DA, the hitman and a bent cop on the pad. Bodies continue to drop, including Drawdy’s sassy elderly neighbor, a woman who makes everything in the block her business.

The action accelerates when Drawdy is finally released and the charges get dropped after the track record of the witness-for-hire and his connections with the DA are revealed. Father and son get closer than they’ve been since Drawdy became a cop, which makes the elder man a target.

Ludden has crafted a winning, action-packed thriller with colorful and wonderfully etched characters, led by his protagonist, his boss and mentor and a powerful woman in a wheelchair who is Drawdy’s best friend, Char, a detective who was paralyzed after getting shot in the back by a rogue cop in an earlier Drawdy saga.

Pick up this latest Drawdy tale. Big mistake if you don’t. Big thrill if you do.