Leonard's solid-gold pen squirts acid all over Hollywood—for which he's written several screenplays—in this multilayered, superbly entertaining crime thriller. Hollywood to Leonard is a whacked-out Wonderland stocked with schemers and dreamers, perfect foils for his underworld Alice, Miami loan-shark Chili Palmer. Chili arrives in Tinseltown by way of Vegas, where he's flown to track down Leo Devoe, who's welshed on a $15,000 loan—and has also bilked an airline of $300,000. Chili loses Devoe's trail, but picks up that of another deadbeat, schlock-film producer Harry Zimm (Slime Creatures, etc.). Flying to L.A., Chili breaks into Zimm's hideaway and confronts the producer, only to end up talking movies and agreeing to help him cool out the drug-dealing film investors Zimm owes money to—money he's lost in Vegas trying to raise a stake to produce a mainstream film, Mr. Lovejoy. It's those investors—vintage Leonard villains, especially sleek and sadistic Bo Catlett—plus Ray Bones, a wiseguy seeking to settle an old score, who keep Chili on his toes in triple-cross scenarios involving the airline's stolen $300,000 as he falls for a former horror starlet, helps Zimm rewrite Mr. Lovejoy (with many pages of shooting-script reproduced here), and tries to snare method star Michael Ware for the Lovejoy lead. Chili's life—along with the madcap plot—enfolds like origami when Ware, fascinated with the loan shark, decides to star as Chili in a film about Chili's Hollywood Adventure. And it all ends with Chili, flush with filmmaking fever, mulling over the best ending to that Film—because "Fuckin endings, man, they weren't as easy as they looked." Very smart and twisty and funny: a Leonard classic.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1990
ISBN: 0062120255
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1990
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
A kidnapping survivor–turned-vigilante tries to save another young woman while the police do everything they can to save them both.
Flora Dane might look unscathed but she’s permanently scarred from having been abducted while on spring break in Florida seven years earlier by Jacob Ness, a sadistic trucker who held her captive for 472 days, keeping her in a coffin for much of the time when he wasn't forcing her to have sex with him. Now back in Boston and schooled in self-defense, Flora is obsessed with kidnapped girls and the nature of survival, a topic she touches on a bit more than necessary in the many flashbacks to her time in captivity. Gardner (Crash & Burn, 2015, etc.) must walk a fine line in accurately evoking the horrors of Flora’s past ordeals without slipping into excessive descriptions of violence; she is not entirely successful. When Flora thwarts another kidnapping attempt by killing Devon Goulding, her would-be abductor, Gardner regular Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren’s interest is piqued even though she’s meant to be on restricted duty. Then Flora disappears for real, and Warren, along with Dr. Samuel Keynes, the FBI victim specialist from Flora's original kidnapping, fears it’s related to the kidnapping three months earlier of Stacey Summers, a case Flora followed closely. Gardner alternates between Warren’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance and Flora’s present-day hell at the hands of a new enemy, but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity.
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95457-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Although it’s as shallow as the grave an inconvenient body is buried in, this thriller does offer some nastily entertaining...
A marital thriller aspiring to the Gone Girl model offers some dark surprises.
Scott is a pen name for two collaborators, one a publishing professional, the other a screenwriter, and they seem to have done their homework. The book, already optioned for a TV series, is squarely aimed at a slot in the growing list of he-said, she-said mysteries. The novel focuses on spouses Paul and Rebecca, whose almost two-decade-long marriage flounders after his contracting business fails. She’s thriving as a pharmaceutical sales rep—a convenient job for a woman with Rebecca’s raging opioid addiction. They are not a likable pair. Both are inveterate liars, Paul about his adultery, Rebecca about her drug abuse. They swing wildly between intricate, amoral scheming and profound naiveté—at several points, the only thing more incredible than one character’s lies is that the other believes them so readily. Paul’s affair with an unhappy neighbor goes sideways about the same time Rebecca’s boss faces legal problems and the disappearance of his beautiful wife, whom Rebecca detests. Someone ends up dead, of course, and Paul and Rebecca must dispose of a body. But when a hidden corpse is found, it’s not the one they buried. The book has multiple first-person narrators and a plot that weaves strands through various timelines; through its middle portion it bogs down under the weight of all that but tightens up for a fast-paced final third that accelerates past some less than believable elements.
Although it’s as shallow as the grave an inconvenient body is buried in, this thriller does offer some nastily entertaining twists.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4452-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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