Meet Lennon, a mute Irish getaway driver who has fallen in with the wrong heist team on the wrong day at the wrong bank. Betrayed, his money stolen and his battered carcass left for dead, Lennon is on a one-way mission to find out who is responsible—and to get back his loot. But the robbery has s...
SECRET DEAD MEN starts well enough with a creative opening narrative and then an intriguing supernatural/urban fantasy twist leading into the main thrust of the plot. Swierczynski does a deft job with the first 3/4 of the novel merging a standard procedural/detective story with elements of pulp ...
So, what do you do when your boss drags you to work on a Saturday morning and announces that you have two choices -- drink poison and die OR let him shoot you in the head (and die). Which do you pick?I chose to read SEVERANCE PACKAGE purely based on the fact that I read Swierczynski's THE BLONDE ...
Third and Spring Garden Jack spat blood on the sidewalk and wondered why he wasn’t already dead. Not that he hadn’t tried like hell to avoid it. He’d screamed and begged and held on to the molding in the stairway, for Christ’s sakes, but the Aryan Man was stronger, and the begging had only seeme...
This stopped the bullet, Harry.Robert Downey, Jr.: No, not really.—Kiss Kiss Bang Bang OKAY, GOD, really, you can take me home now.Hardie’s battered and broken and shot and burned and lacerated and cut and dizzy and sweating and bruised body lay in a glittering field of broken glass. There we...
Place has been around forever, nothing has been modernized. Tiny flecks of the hash browns you scoop up with your fork today were probably part of a potato originally served to your grandpop back in the day. Wildey likes the diner for its sense of history. Plus, it’s cheap. Five bucks buys you an...
No sofa bed, no blanket, no pillow.No Meghan.The room looked like my grandpop’s apartment, only someone had redecorated the place while I’d been sleeping. The front windows were covered with brown cardboard and masking tape. Tiny needles of light from the El station outside shot out from between ...
—Eddie Bunker HARDIE STARTED WITH something small: push-ups. One-armed, one-half push-ups, to be exact. His old man’s favorite exercise. The only exercise a man needed, he always said. And the old man’s favorite punishment was a half push-up. That’s when you started a traditional push-up, then s...
Nobody wants to be here, but nobody seems to be in a hurry to separate, either. Cary is absolutely and embarrassingly shitfaced. Jean makes excuses as she tries to pry him away from the small table serving as the bar, which excuses do nothing to disguise that he’s calling ...