Ladykiller “…42nd Street had no more hope of being cleaned up than a toxic waste dump.” The Times Square area and “the Deuce” (42nd Street) may be sanitized now, in 2013—but it wasn’t in 1991, when the events in Ladykiller take place. Nor was the Deuce sanitized in 1979-80, when I lived in New York and got my timid kicks just photographing the area. Handgun possession is illegal in New York without a hard-to-get permit but you could window shop for shoulder holsters in the Deuce...in case, like, you moved out of state, or something. Yeah. Right. That’s it, Officer. I’m moving out of state. The murderer in Ladykiller uses a .45 automatic, Model of 1911, US military issue from 1911 to 1985, and found in the hands of half the hardboiled noir characters who rolled off the pens of writers like Dashiell Hammett. Nice addition, that, to the ruthless style in which Ladykiller is written. The writing voice in Ladykiller is a civilized third person voice, not the feral, urban male, first-person voice we know from the classics and from most contemporary noir. So, it’s extra creepy—this distanced, relatively civilized voice talking about the most horrible things. I did not see the final twist coming at the end of Ladykiller and I loved reading this well-crafted book by a husband and wife team of two New Yorkers, Lawrence Light and Meredith Anthony, who know what the Deuce was like before the city finally swept it, well, relatively clean. And I liked it all the more for seeing what I believed to be the interplay, in the writing, of masculine and feminine detail.
I greatly enjoyed this story !! It's about a serial killer murdering women who seem to have no connection. A lot of the story is also based around the happenings in a Crisis Centre. Great characters and the story zips along with plenty of surprises along the way and a jarring ending.Actually, it was a shocker and not an ending I had expected or wanted.My only gripe was spacing !! There were a LOT of random gaps left in paragraphs for no reason and very often no spacing left after a fullstop. I don't know why that was but if you highlighted one word it highlighted the next too as it considered it just one because of the lack of spacing. It niggled me a lot hence the one star dropped. It also happened in conversations. Both people speaking in the same sentence and that made for tricky reading a bit too. Also Hawaiian was spelt properly a couple of times and then not a couple of times which is careless.However, it's one I'd recommend for sure.
What do You think about Ladykiller (2007)?
I wanted to like this book. I really did. But I couldn't finish it. There is something call "suspension of disbelief" that one has to have in order to get the reader to let the author take them on the magical mystery tour. In this case, the author did shoddy research on social work vs. sociology. I spent almost 20 years in social work. It is not sociology. Sociology is an academic study of groups of people. Social workers work with individuals, rarely groups, and often in a therapeutic manner. The inability of the author(s) to distinguish between fields was a problem - had they not done it over, and over again I might have forgiven one slip. I found the sexual tension/romantic interests stilted - the language stilted as well. The initial casting of potential lethality on a variety of people was great. However, the lead social worker character was bizarre. She'd have been a nightmare to work with in a field where you need excellent teamwork. I just could not see her as screwed up as the authors made her while still being able to do her job and be a mentor, Nor would she have been a noted sociologist. (rolls eyes)Adequate research is absolutely necessary. James Mitchner wrote wonderful stories because of his paid researchers. This story bombed (for me) because of lousy research. Too bad. It had potential.
—Marsha Graham
