'A wisecracking novel that is truly both wise and cracking' - Esquire, Book of the Month
'Like a film noir: shadowy, subtle and sly. It reads like LA Confidential but set in Chicago - all pop culture, bondage and cigarette smoke. A must-read.' - Elle, Book of the Month
'Branton is a brilliant ventriloquist and this book is wildly entertaining: a Roman Candle of a novel, fizzing out a cascade of one-liners, apercus and caustic observations on life. Great fun.' - Daily Telegraph
'A fun, slick read' - Guardian
'What more could you want? A corking thriller - cinematic, literary and clever.' - Daily Mirror
'Cheesecake bondage pinups, cheap-thrill dime novels and B-movies collide in Branton's pitch-perfect novel. His ear for the lingo and lowlife landscape lives up to the legacy of Charles Willeford and Cornell Woolrich, and he delivers an ending that is literally dynamite.' - Publishers' Weekly
'A book about a low-down, dirty world, and the shocking truth about why that world had to end. You read it fast, with a permanent wry smile ... Full of the twang and slang of the film noir era, written lovingly from the contemplative distance of fifty years, it's cleverly done, and true.' - The Observer
'Branton has wild talent, which the S/M mafia noir of The House of Whacks proves in spades.' - Neon
'Mad, fast-paced fest of popular culture, highly satirical and full of wild, odd and downright peculiar characters. Exciting and entertaining.' - Heat
'Fans of The Love Parade, his spot-on dissection of the end of our century, will already know how well Branton can write. Unlike many of our popular male novelists, who seem to aim their fiction at an adolescent audience, Branton is a very adult author. He's able to address death and disease with the necessary maturity, is unusually good at depicting sexual relationships, managing to be both tender and convincing, yet still manages to deliver straightforward dramatic conclusion that will satisfy readers who have taken this book as a thriller, as well as those moved by the small, human detail. This is a novel worth taking seriously.' - Independent
'A cult noir thriller. Great stuff.' - The Bookseller
'A Pulp Fiction-style shared narrative. While the prose is hard and fast, the characterisation is supremely sensitive. Climaxing in a miasma of gunpowder, gangsters, Nazi gold and whips, complex regrets about ambition, love and responsibility are played out to a softer, more dignified conclusion. Branton seems to have pushed some female buttons with this book.' - Frank magazine

The House of Whacks is set in '50s Chicago, where a failed actress, loosely based on kitsch icon Betty Page, gets mixed up with a mobster when his outfit takes over the eponymous House, a soft-porn outfit she's been reduced to modelling for. Meanwhile, a fiftysomething editrix of pulp fiction novels is dying of cancer, leaving her pool of hack writers in the lurch; and a hapless screenwriter and his stuntwoman girlfriend find themselves in hock to a mob-connected exploitation film producer. All three hatch a plan to commit the perfect heist - trouble is, they all pick the same place on the same day.