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FINAL SCORE by Emmett Grogan

FINAL SCORE

By

Pub Date: Oct. 7th, 1976
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

This congestive, feisty superheist, more like an uproar, comes closest to Grogan's own Ringolevio (1972) with vague reminders of George Higgins' Digger's Game which was by no means as noisy. Thus you'll have a hard time keeping a running tally on Lee Warren, just out of the slammer where he's spent five years, or Skidmore who's actually a nuclear physicist, or Terry Sage and his girl, the alluringly absent DayDream, who can handle a car better than Evel Knievel no matter how spaced out she is. Their program includes a ""nice quiet lift"" of two million dollars from a South Brooklyn bank; the peeling of a safe full of cocaine from a Medical Center which ends up safely packaged in chopped round; and finally a show of real power--the theft of three kilos of plutonium. While two rather inert members of the Homicide Squad officiate, there's a young man called Billy Jamaic, the Godspeed killer, who performs last rites on all those he keeps popping off with his .32. Grogan's book is funny, street-smart and combustible--full of scuzzy characters and sophisticated tools. It's all too busy, but then these people have to hurry to get nowhere.