The Smack
A Novel
by Richard Lange
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Pub Date Jul 18 2017 | Archive Date Aug 18 2017
Description
One snowy night, he crosses paths with a sweet-talking hooker who's tired of the streets, and sparks fly. When an old friend of his turns up spreading a rumor about two million dollars in army money smuggled out of Afghanistan and stashed in an apartment in Los Angeles, it seems like a chance at the score of a lifetime. So Petty and the hooker head south, and straight into trouble.
A wounded vet, a washed-up actor, and Petty's estranged daughter are all players in the dangerous game they find themselves caught up in. For the winner: a fortune. For the loser: a bullet to the head. Propulsive, suspenseful, and written with a searing lyricism, The Smack shows once again that "Lange is a writer firing on all cylinders who belongs in the top tier of novelists working today" ( Omaha World-Herald).
Advance Praise
“With all the dexterity of Thomas Perry, Lange walks the thin line between caper novel and blood-splattered noir, leading up to a rip-roaring finale. This fine piece of tragicomic crime fiction sets up like a stand-alone, but we’d sure like to see more.” —Booklist
“If Elmore Leonard and Dennis Cooper collaborated on a novel, they might produce something as exciting, harrowing and emotionally powerful as The Smack. . . . The Smack arrives like a genuine miracle—that rare thriller that will jack your pulse even as it breaks your heart.” —Adam Sternbergh, author of Shovel Ready
“The characters are real and satisfying, the relationships will warm your heart and break it at the same time. The Smack is convincing, hectic and terrific fun.” —Joe Ide, author of IQ
“The Smack is much more than a crime novel. It is a novel about life itself. . . . Lange’s sensitivity and pacing are reminiscent of Raymond Carver, Charles Willeford, and Jim Thompson.” —Gerald Petievich, author of To Live and Die in L.A. and The Sentinel
“The Smack just might be Mr. Lange’s best yet, and that’s saying something. His Los Angeles tableau of concrete and graffiti and neon is as sharp as razor wire. The characters are authentic down to the bone, the dialogue pitch-perfect believable, the desperation palpable, the situation urgent, the story riveting.” —Tom Cooper, author of The Marauders
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780316327626 |
| PRICE | $26.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 368 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Joe H, Reviewer
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
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