The Frost-Haired Vixen

Nuclear Bombshell #4

by John Zakour

In the year 2061, Zachary Nixon, the last P.I. on Earth, is hired by Santana Clausa, the mutant CEO of the North Pole Organization, to find a not-so-nice killer who is trying to sabotage the winter holidays by picking off her cloned elf workers one-by-one. Original.

Genres: Science Fiction, Humor, Mystery, Holiday, Audiobook, Crime, Fiction

338 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 5, 2006

About the author

From the Author's Website

John Zakour is a humor/sf/fantasy writer with a Master's degree in Human Behavior and slowly plugging away at his Ph.D. He has written zillions (well, thousands) of gags for syndicated comics and comedians (including: Rugrats, Grimmy, Bound and Gagged, Dennis the Menace and Joan River's old TV show.) John also writes his own syndicated comic, Working Daze for United Media. John has been the regular cartoonist for Geek.com and has sold cartoons or gags to hundreds of journals and magazines. John is also a contributor to Nickelodeon magazine writing Fairly Odd Parents and Jimmy Neutron comic books. Recently he has started writing Simpsons comics for Bongo.


John’s first humorous SF mystery book, The Plutonium Blonde (DAW 2001, co-written with Larry Ganem and started of as an interactive web story for the Sci Fi channel) was named one of the top 30 SF books of 2001 by The Chronicle of Science Fiction who called it, “the funniest SF book of 2001”. His second novel, The Doomsday Brunette (DAW Feb 2004) has made the Locus best sellers list. The third book in the series, The RadioActive Redhead, also made the SF best seller list.

Besides his novels John has sold numerous short stories to anthologies and magazines. John has written the dialog and song lyrics for Frogwares Software computer game Around the World in 80 days. For something a bit different John writes skits for the Harlem Rockets basketball team.

In the past, John has written and helped develop the first year and season of the comic book and animated series: Caramel Crew, for Mobtoons. John also has written for the independent SF TV show, “Realm of the Mind”. John also helped develop an animated sf horror series, called Prime Squad for MUV Technologies in India. His romantic comedy, Skin Deep about an ordinary guy who can’t believe the hottest girl on campus is actually in love with him has won a couple of writing awards. John has also written for Ebru tv.

John use to be a database programmer / web guru / science writer for NYSAES.

When he's not writing or studying John likes to play softball, watch TV and hang out with his wife and son. He use to do judo and karate, but those have been replaced by tai chi and archery.

Reviews

[Bryan Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is better than the third one was. Someone wants to end Holiday, the futuristic replacement for all earthly December holidays. To make things fair the world council created Santana Clausa, the titular frost-haired vixen, and an army of elves to take care of managing Holiday for everyone on earth.

This takes Zach out of his element and to the north pole, without his fancy gun, and his fancy armor, and is super-retro car. The change of location made it more character based which was nice. HARV is back to mostly being his old self, and the gags and inappropriate social references continue at a fair clip.

I enjoyed being wrong about the bad ... uh... person. I had guessed the criminals' condition properly but had guessed the wrong character. I'm ok with that. I had enough clues to figure out what was happing and the action sequences wrapping up the story were pretty good.

All in all, these are fun little books. They are designed to be brain fluff and they work perfectly for that. I've got several more of these so I will continue along.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zach Johnson, the only living P.I. has another rousing adventure in this comedic Science Fiction pulp offering by John Zakour. This time, the dame who needs his help is Santana, the world-wide symbol of Holiday! Holiday is the melding of Christmas, Kwanza, and Hanakah into one event by the world Council, and Santana, the red mninskirt bombshell has replaced Santa at the North Pole. She, and her genetically created elves, appear to be under attack, as two of the elves have been murdered, and Santana needs Zach to save the world yet again.

I still get tickled by the curse words used-- DOS and GATES-- obviously a microsoft inspired rage.

And Zach gets the snot beat out of him, by women, repetitively, and has to deal with his personal computer, Harv, who sometimes gets in the way instead of helping.

there's no real hardcore Science Fiction here.. just an interesting laughable future, a comical cast of characters, and melodramatic fun! Zakour tickles the funnybone once again, writes a decent mystery, and fills it in with pizzaz!

One huge peeve, though, was the number of typographical\grammarical errors I found in this book..

one place it says "I have meet" where it obviously should have said "met"

the Santana Stinks Society gets misprinted into the Santana Sticks Society in one place.

I have never seen such a poor job of editing\proofreading done in all my life. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please Note: I read and reviewed this book in 2007. Just copying over the review from Amazon.

Overview: John Zakour goes it alone in this, the fourth book featuring freelance PI Zachary Nixon Johnson - the only freelance PI left in the world in the year 2060. In his latest adventure, he is approached by Santana Clausa - who runs the North Pole to make the toys for Holiday, when each person on Earth receives 3 presents. Two of the elves that she oversees have been murdered and she wants Zach to find out who did the deed.

Immediately people start trying to kill him. Just another day in the life of Zachary Nixon Johnson!

When he arrives at the Pole, he goes undercover to try to determine who among the current guests may have been the murderers. With guardbots being reprogrammed to attack him, sugared-up Elves all around and argumentative fellow guests to contend with, this won't be a walk in the snow.

Review: In some ways this book was superior to the joint ventures in the previous works - it is a bit more gritty and "real." In others, it needed more work - there were a lot more typos and grammatical errors, for instance. All-in-all, I would say it holds its own against the first three books in the series and I look forward to seeing where Zakour takes this most amusing cross-genre series in the future. Keep 'em coming!

[Nai Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is for the entire series I binged in two weeks like a crazy day on Netflix. So I must say I loved it! Humorous, campy and fun for all the right reasons. Zakour pokes fun at all the tropes and takes it to the next level, so much over the top you have to chuckle at it poking fun of itself. Just the right blend of Noir and Sci-Fi to make the universe come alive! I highly recommend a binge on this one if you want something light hearted and fun to read!

[Hunter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up from a thrift store for holiday reading because the premise seemed weird and funny. The book is weird and funny, but not in a good way. The author has a…fixation…on women’s pheromones and writes some noticeably bad dialogue, especially between the main character and his Latina fiancée. The humour is too often juvenile, and characters have an annoying tendency to make pop culture references then stop and point out that they made a reference. This is followed by confirmation of whether or not the character they were talking to also understood that a reference was made and if they know which particular cultural touchstone was being referenced.

The mystery plot plays out in a procedural fashion before the evil plan is just sort of foiled and tossed away for a last minute twist and pages and pages of the characters standing around in a room waiting for the climactic action set piece to start.

And to top it off, the paperback edition was full of typographical errors.

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a lot of fun. The right mixture of sci fi, detective pulp, and humor. I have to say that I enjoyed everything about this book from its premise to the writing style of the author, to the story. The characters who were meant to be likable were likable, and even the characters you were meant to dislike were dis-likable in a fun way. The story was relatively fast paced and thoroughly enjoyable, and I plan on picking up the others in the series soon!

[Derrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was interesting, but never grabbed my attention. Great GA acting, but the story didn't grab me nor turn me away. If I get a hold of anymore, I'll check them out.

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

If there were more books like John Zakour’s series with Zachary Nixon Johnson, Last PI on Earth, we would probably have to come up with a new genre, faux noir. I can’t imagine anything better to call a fedora-wearing, wise-cracking detective in the mold of a Sam Spade cliché in a far-fetched futuristic world where the paradigm quickly becomes a pun. The Frost-Haired Vixen continues Zakour’s pulp theater of the absurd without his co-writing partner. Somehow, he manages to keep up the level of risibility without sacrificing either the action sequences that combine tension and slapstick or the pace that makes the Marx Brothers seem lugubrious.
As is the tradition in this series, the eponymous Frost-Haired Vixen isn’t the vixen you think she is. Zakour hides a bit of misdirection from the reader until the appropriate time. Then, he takes one on a byzantine waterslide of suspicion-counter-suspicion-synth-suspicion (my apologies to Hegel for that last one)before settling on the penultimate suspects and the ultimate suspects.

In this “episode,” Zach is hired by Santana (not the guitarist but the feminine incarnation of the best of Santa Claus and a living, breathing, girlie magazine) to investigate the death of two elves at the North Pole. Early on, we learn two vital pieces of information: 1) mega-corporations like UltraMegaHyperMart and certain technology companies don’t like Holiday (the neutered, socialized version of Hannukah, Kwaanza, Christmas, and Saturnalia for which Santana is responsible) and 2) elves have been cloned to drink water, cocoa, and eggnog (anything else—like wine for instance—is poisonous to their systems). We also learn something we should remember from every murder mystery we’ve ever read, “Everyone is a suspect.” In fact, since Zach makes more retro-cultural references than Jim Cramer of Mad Money, I’m almost surprised he doesn’t bring House, M.D.’s “Everybody lies!” along with his SNL “Church Lady” and her, “Isn’t that special?” (p. 291).
With delightfully bizarre recurring characters (like super wrestlers, genius superheroes, psionic threats become allies, and rock legends turned politicians) and Zach’s own supercomputer personality implant (HARV), you can rely on insanity, non-sequiturs, and enough threats to the world (and Zach personally) to keep even a 24-hour news cycle humming. If you don’t like one chapter, you can just skip to the next. There’s something for everyone here and it just keeps moving—more of a teleport pad than conveyor belt, but moving nonetheless.

One other note and I’m not the only one to comment. I remember a letter to Computer Gaming World back when I hadn’t yet joined the editorial staff. The reader was complaining about the number of typographical errors in the magazine (it was understaffed) and begged the editors to, at least, run each file through a spelling checker. Of course, we now know that the spelling checkers generally let legitimate words through, even if they are used in illegitimate ways. A smart-aleck, part-time editor responded that the magazine had acquired a new “speeling chunker” and there should be no further problems. Well, The Frost-Haired Vixen had problems that could have been caught by a “speeling chunker” (like “percen” for “percent” on p. 130) and problems that a “speeling chunker” would miss (“Santana Sticks Society” instead of “Stinks” on p. 211 and improbable phrases such as “A good warrior knows how to think on her feet as on well as her back” (p. 218) and “Once I had meet with each suspect…” (p. 219) and “wired to directly to my brain” (p. 290)). Sometimes, this seems like computer-spawned errors and, as Zach sometimes says, “It hurts my brain.” Of course, a few textual problems such as those just mentioned won’t keep me away from the next book. I’m so connected to Zakour’s faux noir universe that I can’t get loose any easier than HARV can get out of Zach’s brain.

[Joshua Palmatier · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Frost-Haired Vixen is the fourth novel in the Zachary Nixon Johnson private investigator of the future series, although this is the first of the series to be written solo by John Zakour. The previous three books were co-written with Lawrence Ganem. So I wasn interested to see how, if at all, the book changed in comparison to the others.

And there was a change. This book isn't quite as frantic in the action department as the previous three novels and I found that I liked this. In the other novels, I almost felt like the book was too out-of-control at times, because no matter where the main character went or what he did, SOMETHING tried to kill him. For amusement, that was fine in the first book, but by the third it was getting kind of boring. We don't have that in this novel. Sure, there are places where he gets attacked, but those attacks are as common or as relentless, and they all played a role in the overall plot. Some of the attacks in the previous novels seemed random and arbitrary.

I also feel like the main character is much more solid and settled in this book than in the previous ones. He came across as much more real with his interactions with his girlfriend, Electra, for example (and thank you for not having every interaction with her be her beating him up because she's ticked off about his job). I also felt the relationship with his implanted computer, HARV, was much better as well.

So I liked the character better and the writing, but the plot was only so-so. Much easier to follow, less convoluted, easier to understand (which is all good) . . . but not quite as interesting as some of the previous novels. The main idea here is that in the new world there's a new holiday called The Holiday, in which everyone on the planet gets three gifts. One is one that they wish for and the other two are decided upon by the coordinator of The Holiday, Santana (the Frost-Haired Vixen of the title, we assume), and her covey of elves who live at the North Pole. Zach is called in because someone has killed two of the elves and Santana wants to know who. Of course there's a plot to destroy the world and Zach uncovers and stops it, but I won't tell you what the plot actually is, nor how he stops it. That's the fun of the book after all.

And even with my hesitation over the plot, the book was indeed fun. I laughed more reading this than the latest Janet Evanovich novel I read, and I certainly had a lot more fun with Zach and HARV and crew. I think that John Zakour has certainly shown he can write a good, entertaining novel on his own, and I'm looking forward to reading the next few in this series.

[Chris McMillan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, now that I have a link to Goodreads on my computer, I can use a keyboard to write up my reviews. I have a hard enough time texting with my big, fat fingers. I don't want to try writing a review on my phone or pad. So now it's time to get caught up with the books I've read, so let's start with The Frost-Haired Vixen.

Okay, I didn't by this book because I've read the earlier books. This mix of noir detective thriller and sci fi was the fourth in the series, and it was hard to know the characters that started popping into the story as it progressed, despite author John Zakour's best attempts to explain the world to new readers.

No, I bought the book while looking at the "Worth it for the cover" rack at Powells Books in Portland, OR, a collection of books that have AMAZING covers. And, come on, with a trench coat wearing male detective with a seductive female Santa Claus on the cover, you know you just HAVE to check it out.

It's a fun book, but the world is too complicated just to drop into without reading the earlier novels. You're confronted with too many mega-corporations, augmented humans, personal AI companions and more that, if this is your introduction into the series, you'll likely be a bit confused at times.

But if you stop trying to figure how those points and just roll with the story, it's pretty entertaining. The climax is a bit too long, but it reaches a satisfying ending. I can't say I'm going to seek out other books in the series, but I won't pass them by should I spy them at Powells.

[Wing Kee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the forth book in the series so there is no need for me to tell you what you are to expect in this series. However, what I can tell you that this book does try adding new things into the series with great and not so great results:

1) The characters once again are the highlight of this series, the banter the dialog the over-the-top nature of them is here once again and this time IT'S CHRISTMAS THEMED!! This is both a good thing and a bad thing as the story itself feels confined to the themed nature of this book but at the same time who doesn't love a Christmas themed book.

2) The world again is fun and also suffers and takes advantage of the Christmas theme. The elfs are hilarious and "naughty time" will make you laugh :)

3) The story is the problem of this story. It's not bad, it just starts interesting and ends interesting but the middle is a bit plodding. The interrogations in particular are a bit of a bore but the final act and the world being more fully explained is a great strength of this book.

As I said, if you've read 3 and are here now you don't really need to read this review. Just go read it and then continue with this enjoyable series.

Onward to The Blue Haired Bombshell!

[Jeff Powers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zach Johnson is back in another whirlwind adventure, this time travelling to the North Pole to help a red hot sexy Santa and her elf problems. I'll admit, I'm not really one for holiday themed stories. I dislike Christmas movies and cringe at festive episodes. But I love this ridiculous series of scifi PI tales. Poking equal fun at pop culture and at the tropes of the hardboiled detective. This is no different. With a ridiculous story to tell and even a few cameos from past adventures, despite the cheesy holiday theme, this was still lots of fun. Some elements have lost their shine since the first book and a few jokes fell flat, so while it isn't the best in the series. If you have at all enjoyed the previous volumes this will be no exception.

[SFReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Frost-Haired Vixen is the fourth novel in the Zachary Nixon Johnson private investigator of the future series, although this is the first of the series to be written solo by John Zakour. The previous three books were co-written with Lawrence Ganem. So I wasn't interested to see how, if at all, the book changed in comparison to the others.

The Frost-Haired Vixen review at SFReader.com

[Meg · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the first half of the book was excellent to read, especially in the post Christmas blues, the ending fell rather flat. While the idea for a villain was good, the execution was rough at best and consequences felt minimal for that entire plot.

A good read around Christmas, but rather disappointing in the end.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know exactly why, but I didn't like this one quite as much as the previous three. It was still lots of fun but... I don't know, something was missing. But still, lots of fun to be had in reading it, just a bit weirder than your average sci-fi-future-noir-comedic-thriller.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

these are fun parodies of the hard-boiled detective novel in a science-fiction setting. marred by numerous typos, but fun if you can look past that. I read it at Christmas which was particularly appropriate

[Julie Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual, a fun, wild and inventive ride. I have read other books int this series and love the tongue in cheek homage to sci fi pulp and hard boiled detective fiction. Very witty, clever, fun, adventure and mystery story. Not my favorite in the series but good nonetheless.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

These books do not come out fast enough for me. While I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, these books break the realm and cross-genre so easily and naturally, how could I not love them?

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of the same from John Zakour.

[Jo · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was badly edited and not inventive... felt like reading the first book over again.

[Geoff Schaeffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fluffy retro-future noir. I've read the first three books in the series, so it is clearly up my alley.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the few books that is laugh out loud funny. A great read, especially for the upcoming holiday season.

[Violet · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fluffy retro-future noir.
Also - Santa has been upgraded into Santana and now has boobs.
That's pretty much the whole plot.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing much to say other than I love this series

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fun no brain pop SciFi novel.