Thank Net Galley

So wonderful to get a great book. What makes it great; originality for starters!!

Octane eraser from Reno to LA with some stops in between with an underlying message of " they are called VETS for a reason"!!

This is a well written and intense book. For all hard-boiled action fans. Could not put it down.

Casino
Deals
Money
Ex-cons
Army
Veteran
Mucho dineros
Cash
Hustle
In over your head
Divorced
Estranged daughter
Modern noir written in the strain of the masters like Jim Thompson and Raymond chandler.
Desperation intertwined, money intertwined, lives on the line, and just how it will all pan out has you unflinching reading on to the rumination on affairs.
A one or two sitting page burner, clear and crisp, well written dialogue, potent prose and scenes.
The main protagonist has a need, and eventually a real by all means necessary need, he has a quandary of affairs to settle with plenty in the balance lives from past and lives for the future.
Layered in just the write length a noir tale like this needs to be with the right amount of description and not too deep but with a character in too deep.
Some more heart of darkness for end of July 2017 with a diamond in the center of it all.

THE SMACK
Richard Lange
Mulholland Books/Little Brown
978-0-316-32762-6
Hardcover
Thriller

I will confess that in spite of myself I had to stop reading THE SMACK for just a few minutes. This wonderfully written caper novel, so dark and in some parts so god awfully depressing, was almost too much for me at first. Author Richard Lange sucks you in and won’t let you out at a minimum baseline, but THE SMACK makes you a part of the proceedings, taking you to places where you will never want to go and making you grateful that you’re not there.

We meet Rowan Petty right off the starting block in THE SMACK and the show is but for a few vignettes pretty much all his right through to the finish. Petty is messed up. He’s not an addict, though he does drink a bit. He is instead an example of someone stuck in his own bad juices. We meet him as he is stuck in Reno, Nevada, the self-styled “biggest little city in the world,” but he’s not there for the skiing or even for the gambling. Instead, on a lonely Thanksgiving weekend Petty is stuck with a broken door car in a dead-end motel, attempting to do the only thing he is halfway good at, which is running phone scams. Petty has pretty much run out of asphalt on that particular road, however, when he is seemingly thrown a lifeline by a former associate of his father’s, someone who was also in the game and who has a line on what appears to be a major score. It seems that a couple of servicemen in Afghanistan are ripping off their Uncle and shipping the proceeds back to the states and which are being hidden away in Los Angeles, awaiting the day when the gents return back to the world. All Petty has to do is go to Los Angeles, locate the stash, and liberate it. It’s easier said than done, but Petty is desperate, and with his car fixed and a newly acquired traveling companion --- a prostitute whom Petty has befriended, or maybe it’s the other way around --- Petty heads to Los Angeles in a do or die effort to liberate the money. He gets close at first, but never really strikes paydirt, and is on the verge of giving up when circumstances overtake him, as it were. Suddenly, Petty has no choice. He needs a lot of money, and quickly --- it’s literally a life or death situation --- and throws every dirty trick in his skillset into getting it. Petty knows that he is dealing with some very dangerous people, but he doesn’t know how dangerous and how close they really are. One gets the feeling almost from the beginning of THE SMACK that it is not going to end well, and it doesn’t. At least not entirely.

One thing is clear from the beginning of THE SMACK: Petty is not a good guy. Let’s state it positively instead. He is a bad guy who has his occasional moments in spite of himself. Lange does not try to make Petty a sympathetic character; you will cheer him on, however, for his motivations, even when you probably shouldn’t. I can count on one hand contemporary authors who can do this as well as Lange: Wallace Stroby, Jason Starr, the late Elmore Leonard, Donald Winslow, and Peter Leonard. That’s it. Lange also gets into the grit and dirt that rises out of riding out bad luck and terrible decisions which have repercussions for months, years, and decades. It’s all here in THE SMACK, which is worth buying and reading just for its descriptions of crap motel rooms. And so much more. Strongly recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2017, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.