HOOLIGANS

by William Diehl ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 1984

Who's killing all the Cosa Nostra types in ""Dunetown,"" a once-elegant city on the Georgia coast, now a vice-ridden racing-track town? That's the question for narrator/hero Jake Kilmer of the Federal Racket Squad in this massively derivative mystery-novel--which takes a serviceable little formula-plot and belabors it, with sheer repetition and padding, into a 448-page slog. The ""Cincinnati Triad,"" a Mafia family, has recently shifted operations to Dunetown--pursued, as ever, by hardboiled sleuth Jake. But then Triad members start dying violently, at predictably regular intervals. So Jake, whose main mission is to uncover the Triad's links to other Mobsters, teams up for the investigation with Dunetown's ""Special Operations Branch"" (""SOBs,"" of course), ""about as strange a bunch of lawmen as I've ever seen gathered in one room."" (Diehl's imitation of Wambaugh et al. here is especially pallid.) Meanwhile, 40-ish Jake, who had close friends in Dunetown 20 years back, is also rediscovering his long-lost love for gorgeous Doe--now married to Harry Raines, the State Racing Commissioner and a gubernatorial hopeful. Could Raines somehow be involved in the mob doings? Is there a connection to race-fixing at the track? Why are local bigwigs trying to cover up the whole story about all the killings? And why is Jake having italicized flashbacks to his traumatic experiences in Vietnam (where Doe's brother died)? The answers, borrowed from Hammett and more recent mystery-writers, will be obvious to most readers from the very start. But Diehl nonetheless strings things out laboriously--with Jake'sguilty/lustful stewings (which often read like parodies of Spillane-ish mannerisms), innumerable corpses (including that of Doe's husband), and lots of okay chase/shootout/showdown violence. Passable fare for undiscriminating fans of hardboiled sleuthing; otherwise--another, drabber disappointment (cf. the lurid Chameleon) from the author of Sharky's Machine.

Pub Date: July 12, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Villard/Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION