An accountant embezzled a bunch of money from a rich guy who is a major league asshole. Even worse, the accountant slept with his girlfriend. The accoAn accountant embezzled a bunch of money from a rich guy who is a major league asshole. Even worse, the accountant slept with his girlfriend. The accountant ends up living quietly in a small desert town where the residents have nicknamed him 'The Heron' due to his odd body shape and distinctive walk. When the wealthy jerk learns where The Heron is, he hires a hit man to finally get revenge, but the rich guy wants to be there to see it done.
This is an Audible Original story read by Ed Harris who gives a great vocal performance. It's only about an hour long, but Winslow's writing and Harris' voice made me wish it was a full blown novel so I could have listened to it for longer. It's a very solid crime story that morphs into a genuine tragedy at some point. Well worth checking out for crime fans on Audible....more
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A rabbi and a Mafia hitman walk into a bar. The joke is that they’re the same person.
Sal Cupertine is a contract kilStop me if you’ve heard this one. A rabbi and a Mafia hitman walk into a bar. The joke is that they’re the same person.
Sal Cupertine is a contract killer for the mob in Chicago, and for decades he managed to remain in the shadows. That all changes after he walks into a FBI sting operation and ends up killing several agents. Now Sal is at the top of the most wanted list, and the mob fake his death and smuggle him to Las Vegas.
After plastic surgery, Sal learns that he’s expected to take on the identity of Rabbi David Cohen as part of the organization for a local gangster who is running schemes connected to a synagogue including disposing of bodies in the Jewish cemetery. With a near photographic memory and an instinct for reading people, Sal quickly falls into the role of a rabbi even as he is making is own plans to someday reunite with the wife and son he left back in Chicago. Meanwhile back in Chicago, Jeff Hopper was scapegoated for Sal’s murders of his fellow FBI agents, and Jeff is convinced that Sal is still alive and is determined to find him. Sal/David also realizes that he’s still got to deal with the dangerous web of mob politics.
I had mixed feelings on this one. There was a lot I liked with a unique story, good characterizations, and some black humor. The idea of a mob hitman pretending to be a rabbi sounds like a goofy plot from an ‘80s action-comedy movie, but Goldberg sets up the premise well and makes it seem plausible. There’s some interesting stuff with Sal learning things about Jewish culture, but this isn’t a story of a bad guy who gets a change of heart. More like Sal is still a killer deep down, he’s just adopting to a new community he's learning to respect.
However, it also seemed just a little drawn out and slow with a lot of time spent on the internal reflections of both Sal/David and Jeff Hopper with both men piling up regrets by their choices that led them to that point. It got a little repetitive with the same themes rehashed again and again.
I started to feel like the entire book could have been a prologue, and in the end, you find out that this is indeed only the start of a story. I knew there was at least a second book to this, but I wasn’t prepared for how little gets resolved here. So the whole novel just felt like sequel set-up.
Still, I liked it enough that I will check out the next one, but if it doesn’t give me more sense of resolution and satisfaction than this one did, I’ll be very disappointed....more
Filmmaker Walter Hill has written a comic. Can you dig it? CAN YOU DIG IT?!!? CAAAANNNNN YOUUUU DIGGGGG ITTT??!!!??
Unfortunately there’s not that muchFilmmaker Walter Hill has written a comic. Can you dig it? CAN YOU DIG IT?!!? CAAAANNNNN YOUUUU DIGGGGG ITTT??!!!??
Unfortunately there’s not that much here to dig.
In 1932 professional gun man Roy Nash gets creatively sprung from prison by the mob in order to track down three hoodlums who double crossed them after a bank heist and killed the boss’s nephew in the process. After Roy tracks them down and kills them he can keep any money left from the robbery he comes across in the process, but his main motivation is finding the old girlfriend who ran off with one of the thieves. When his desire to find her conflicts with his mob mission Roy runs afoul of all kinds of gangsters and crooked cops.
This is a perfectly fine set up for a crime comic, and it’s done well enough. But you’d think the guy who came up with movies like The Warriors and Streets of Fire would have done something with some visual flare and memorable characters. Really, it’s just a series of bland panels in which guys with fedoras and trench coats punch and shoot each other. It’s not entirely fair to blame Hill for this since he didn’t draw it, but on the other hand it all looks very much like his lackluster Bruce Willis Prohibition-era shoot-em-up Last Man Standing so it seems like he just gave some of those old storyboards to the artist and called it a day. Plus, the story is just your standard anti-hero tough-guy killing people for personal reasons rather than for money.
It’s not terrible, but it’s not anything particularly great either....more
I’ve always thought that a man had to have a certain amount of class to pull off wearing a fedora, and Keller fits that profile even if he is a hired I’ve always thought that a man had to have a certain amount of class to pull off wearing a fedora, and Keller fits that profile even if he is a hired killer.
In this short novella Keller gets an interesting proposition. A potential client wants a hit man to take care of his wife’s lover, but he doesn’t know who it is. So the job involves doing some investigating before getting to the murder, and Keller finds himself so intrigued that he buys a new hat because he’s in a detective frame of mind. Things seem to go according to plan at first, but as usual it’s only the killing itself that goes smoothly for Keller.
I was a little hesitant about this because Block had taken Keller through a journey in the novels that seemed to end with his happy retirement, but that’s kind of turned into a semi-retirement which I worried might undercut the entire Keller story a bit. However, Block’s landed at an interesting place with Keller and how he feels about his work so that him dipping a toe back into murder-for-hire doesn’t seem that out of place or a contradiction of what came before.
A lot of the previous books were built off short stories in which Keller goes on gigs that take weird turns while his doubts about what kind of person he was bubbled up in interesting ways. (Any TV producers looking for a crime series to adapt for a show could do a lot worse than Keller.) So getting another installment in this form seems like a natural fit, and I've always loved Keller's tendency to drift off on musings and questions sparked by everyday things he encounters. So it was a genuine delight to be back in Keller’s head that was sporting a spiffy new lid.
In addition to being a fine piece of writing it also functions as great advertising for the hat industry because I wanted to rush out and buy a fedora while reading it....more
There’s no shortage of Sherlocks these days. Both CBS’s Elementary and the BBC's Sherlock are doing fun mI received a free ARC of this from NetGalley.
There’s no shortage of Sherlocks these days. Both CBS’s Elementary and the BBC's Sherlock are doing fun modern day twists on Holmes. When Robert Downey Jr. can tear himself away from his duties as Iron Man he’s been known to play Sherlock as a steampunkish action hero in the movies. Plus, there always new novels featuring the detective being published. Countless other stories inspired by the character are also always circulating like the medical mysteries that Hugh Laurie solved for years on House. So you wouldn’t think that we need yet another variation of Sherlock Holmes.
Thankfully, Joe Ide disagreed and came up with a fresh new take on the world’s most famous consulting detective that is a helluva of a good story and a welcome addition to Sherlockian style books.
Isaiah Quintabe (a/k/a IQ) is a brilliant young man living in a rough area of Los Angeles where he acts as a kind of public service oriented detective for the community. Unfortunately, his services usually only net him baked goods, and Isaiah has a serious need for some cash. That’s when his old roommate Dodson shows up with the offer to figure out who tried to kill a famous rapper for a big payday. Dodson is a hustler that Isaiah doesn’t really trust, but he reluctantly takes the case. His only lead is a security video of a monstrous attack dog who was let loose on the rapper in his own kitchen, but the trail will lead him to a professional killer who loves his work.
The Sherlock influences are pretty obvious from the start. Isaiah is self-contained guy who can make instinctive leaps of logic based on what he observes whose persona can seem cold and off-putting to others. His partner on the case is Dodson which rhymes with Watson if you didn’t notice. There’s an oversized dog that immediately brings to mind The Hound of the Baskervilles. If that’s all there was then this could have been just a Holmes homage without much else going for it.
However, Ide prevents that by coming up with ways to play off the Sherlock tropes. Instead of Dodson being a kiss ass who marvels at IQ’s brilliance their relationship is a contentious one with a troubled history that we get in a parallel plot that also functions as Isaiah’s origin story. I also liked that IQ’s detective skills don’t come from having obscure knowledge like being able to identify the tobacco of Belgian cigarette. Instead he depends on his ability to reason through LA traffic patterns or researching police alarm times as well as applying a common sense rationality to the way people behave to make his deductions, and it comes across as impressive as well as realistic. The backstory of IQ’s life as well and his history with Dodson makes him far more sympathetic as well as giving him legitimate reasons for what he does than Sherlock ever had.
Aside from the Sherlock connections this is also a fast paced mystery/thriller in its own right. We get the hit man character’s perspective, and he’s also built up as being both a very dangerous threat as well as believable. The way that we’re introduced to IQ and Dodson and then get their backstory delivered in installments dovetails nicely with the main story. It’s all got a logical progression and a clever solution that is very satisfying.
Maybe best of all is that IQ is an interesting character that I want to spend more time getting to know. Hopefully, Joe Ide will again follow the example of Arthur Conan Doyle and give us many more stories with this fascinating detective....more
Traveling for work can be a real headache, but it’s especially bad when the city you’re going to is still recovering from a natural disaster.
That’s wTraveling for work can be a real headache, but it’s especially bad when the city you’re going to is still recovering from a natural disaster.
That’s what hit man Roy Cooper encounters when he flies into Los Angeles for his latest job because the area was hit with a round of serious earthquakes that have disrupted utilities and traffic, and the city is still experiencing random aftershocks. Roy manages to take care of his business quickly, but he hits a snag when he stumbles into a group of young gang members assaulting a jogger in an alley. Wacky hijinks ensue during which get Roy shot, and the jogger is killed by a banger with the gun Roy just used to murder his own target. As he recovers in the hospital Roy learns that the jogger was a mayoral candidate, the incident was recorded by a witness, cable news is running the footage repeatedly, and the kid who killed the jogger got away with Roy’s gun.
Everyone mistakenly thinks he’s a hero who tried to help the jogger, but Roy knows that his employers won’t be happy that his face is all over TV. Plus, he’s still got a murder weapon in the hands of a gang member that needs to be retrieved. Roy has other problems in the form of a Kelly Maguire and Science. Kelly is a tough cop on the verge of losing her job for excess force and racist statements who thinks that his story is fishy, and Science, the kid with his gun, is desperate to save face because the video shows Roy punking him so he’s looking for a rematch. Meanwhile, the mayor of LA tries to cope with the political fallout of his rival being murdered as well as find the best way to spin events for the media. Roy just wants to get out of the hospital so he can try to clean up the mess and maybe see his favorite baseball pitcher try to break a record.
This is a debut novel, but Scott Frank is hardly new to the writing game. He’s a veteran screenwriter whose credits include two of my favorite film adaptations of books, Get Shorty and Out of Sight. He’s also written and directed The Lookout, a very good heist movie with a twist starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as well as another respectable adaptation of Lawrence Block’s A Walk Among the Tombstones featuring Liam Neeson.
So Frank knows a thing or two about crime stories, and the experience pays off here. The idea of a hit man getting waylaid by a gang in the midst of an earthquake ravaged LA is the kind of high concept that could make for a pretty good thriller in book or movie form. Frank actually digs a lot deeper into the history and personalities of Roy, Kelly, and Science so that all of them are fully formed characters, and he has more than a few things to say about the gaps between government and police policies versus the reality of life in a poor community dominated by drugs and gangs. This often seemed less like the crime thriller it appears to be and more like something that Richard Price or Dennis Lehane would do.
Roy in particular was compelling to me because he starts as this kind of blank slate that many hit man characters are often written as, but then we get a detailed history that turns into a parallel story that explains how he arrived at this particular moment. This turns into the sad and touching heart of the book.
Also, as a Kansas City area resident I enjoyed that Roy’s backstory is set here, but Frank does make a few errors. For example, you can’t be in Missouri and head east to Kansas City since it’s at the western edge of the state. Two characters committing crimes in Missouri are jailed in Kansas for some reason. A road is referred to as Route 435, but it’s actually an interstate highway, and referred to as I-435 or just 435 by locals, not Route 435. These are all minor nitpicks that didn’t hurt my enjoyment of the book, and I did appreciate that he got a lot right like naming a popular bar downtown and the Royals are always losing any game that Roy watches back in the day. (That’s a situation that has greatly improved though.)
Overall, this is a great crime novel that makes the most of its characters and their settings to tell a compelling story, and it builds to a climactic moment that manages to seem like the ending of a Hollywood blockbuster while simultaneously subverting a reader’s expectations as to how it all plays out. Whether it’s another movie or another book, I’ll be willing to check out more of Scott Frank’s work....more
It’s amazing that a book called The Porkchoppers doesn’t have an ounce of fat.
Porkchopper is actually a slang term for a union official who is more inIt’s amazing that a book called The Porkchoppers doesn’t have an ounce of fat.
Porkchopper is actually a slang term for a union official who is more interested in helping himself than the labor he represents, and there’s a couple of them on display here. Don Cubbin is an aging president of a powerful national union who is facing a serious challenge in an upcoming election by his secretary-treasurer Sammy Hanks. Cubbin is an alcoholic who is bored with the job, and Hanks has a tendency to fly into tantrums that will literally have him pounding the floor and screaming gibberish. So neither one of them seems like the ideal guy to entrust with the livelihoods of thousands of workers.
Still, there’s big money and careers at stake so plenty of people have an interest in getting their guy elected. A wealthy glutton hires a fixer and his lackeys to make sure that Cubbin wins in the interest of continuity and stability. Hanks’ people are working overtime to steal the election in one critical city. Someone has even kicked things up to the next level by hiring a hitman to take out Cubbin.
I’ve got a soft spot for ‘70s sleaze, and it doesn’t get much sleazier than this story with a bunch of bagmen, fixers, and political tricksters working every angle they can think of to swing the election. There’s an enormous amount of money and influence involved so it’s no surprise that people are willing to play dirty, but the thing that makes it all so delightfully squalid is that it feels so cheap and small time at the same time. Even the hitman works at a grocery store as a produce manager as his day job.
Another factor that makes me love this story is that it’s just so well told. There’s a large cast of characters and Ross Thomas provides enough backstory and personality to make each one feel vivid and alive, and he accomplishes all that in a brief 216 pages. That’s writing tight enough to be used for a tourniquet.
This was published in 1972, the same year that the Watergate scandal was just beginning, but Ross Thomas was apparently ahead of the general public in knowing the kind of underhanded tactics can be used to great effect in a political campaign. It’s a look behind a stained curtain at what seedy people do to win, and I enjoyed all of its grimy glory. ...more
This book written in the early ‘80s made me nostalgic for the days when it wasn’t common knowledge that the ammonium nitrate in fertilizer made for a This book written in the early ‘80s made me nostalgic for the days when it wasn’t common knowledge that the ammonium nitrate in fertilizer made for a dandy car bomb. Oh, to be that naive again!
Speaking of naive...Elizabeth Waring is an analyst for the Justice Department who sifts through reports of suspicious deaths nationwide looking for indications that they may be related to the Mafia. The car bombing of a union member in California catches her attention, and she’s sent out on her first field assignment to investigate it. In a parallel story we’re introduced to the Butcher’s Boy, a nameless professional hit man in the midst of a double header in which he killed the union guy and is working on assassinating a US senator in Colorado. Circumstances conspire to suck both Elizabeth and the hit man into an on-going mob war.
This was kind of a weird one. The summary makes it sound like the kind of story where Elizabeth would track down the hit man, or maybe even that the Butcher’s Boy and her would have to form an unlikely partnership to survive the mob war if it was another kind of thriller. It ends up that both of those stories happen and neither one of those stories happen. Yeah, I know. I was confused too.
Instead of any kind of straight line narrative, Elizabeth and BB remain on their individual story rails in which the tracks intersect, but the trains never collide. At the end of the day it’s like the story was really about this mob war with BB in the middle of it while Elizabeth is on the outside looking in. The story zigs and zags and confounds expectations, and that should be a good thing, right? I know in the other Thomas Perry book I’ve read, Strip, that was one of the things I liked about the it.
However, Strip had a large cast of characters that had their own agendas, and it felt like you were getting the scope of the action while reading. Since Butcher’s Boy features only two characters who often aren’t around when major events happen, it ends up feeling oddly disjointed and as if we’re only getting part of the story.
This might have worked if I liked the two leads better. The hitman doesn’t have much of a personality by design, he’s a blank who hides in plain sight, but even his interior dialogue doesn’t tell us much about the guy and the few personality traits we get don’t make him particularly memorable. I did enjoy the details of how he went about his work and his dealing with the unwritten rules that the mob world has to abide by, but I’ve gotten similar stuff in other hitman novels that I’ve enjoyed more.
Elizabeth started out with a lot of promise as a rising star in the Justice Department who still has to contend with the office sexism of the ‘80s. She seemed like the kind of smart and interesting character who could be the hero of this kind of thriller, but somewhere along the way she turned into an absolute dunce. Yeah, she’s supposed to be a rookie, but she screws up a couple of huge things in this, and it stretched credibility to the breaking point that she wouldn’t be suspended and facing some kind of review board instead of remaining on the investigation. At one point this reaches a level where she isn’t just terrible at her job, she’s pretty awful at being a decent human being, too.
(view spoiler)[Her escorting the mob informant to his doom was just a comedy of errors, and after she practically hands the guy up on a plate to be murdered, she does...nothing? There’s a line where she thinks that there’s no point in hurrying after she finds his body. Uh...How about getting on the phone and sounding the alarm that two guys in a Cadillac on a desert highway in the middle of nowhere just murdered a potential federal witness?
Then she doesn’t express any remorse about the guy dying on her watch, and she is far more concerned with what it means for her career. Plus, the fact that she doesn’t once consider that the Mafia’s mole might be her boss after he set her up for that just makes her seem beyond ignorant. (hide spoiler)]
By the end of this I felt like I’d only gotten half of the story told to me by two characters I didn’t really care about. It’s not a bad book, but it just felt like was lacking the bits that would have made it a next level crime book for me. Maybe Perry was trying to subvert some of the tropes of the crime thriller genre, but I never got the impression that there was anything that different or clever happening here....more
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