Peter Roman is the name under which Peter Darbyshire (Please and The Warhol Gang) has written the pulpy urban fantasy noir The Mona Lisa Sacrifice. As he points out in a piece in the National Post, he chose a pen name in order to distinguish, not hide, his different streams of writing.

I want people to know I wrote The Mona Lisa Sacrifice and its sequels. I’m as proud of these new books as the literary books I published before, and I think they’re just as smart, creative and literary as anything else I’ve done.

Smart, creative and literary.

Damned straight.

And fun.

Really fun.

Regular readers of my reviews know that I’m a big fan of pulp writer Chris F. Holm, whose Collector series dazzles and entertains with top-notch craft. Life is too short to read fiction that doesn’t.

Roman’s Cross reminds me of Holm’s Collector: a random immortal making his way through the relatively fucked-up (apparently angels and demons aren’t quite what we thought) supernatural world interwoven with our own. In the case of Cross, he is the soul that inhabits the former body of Jesus Christ and he feeds on angels.

Cross is tasked with finding Mona Lisa. The real Mona Lisa. The Gorgon formerly held by Leonardo DaVinci.

If that sounds a bit over-the-top, that’s because it is.

The Mona Lisa Sacrifice is a little goofy, totally fun and never stupid.

Life is too short not to read this book.