Good grief -- here I am trying to make it through Harry Hunsicker's latest set-in-Dallas thriller Crosshairs, which is pretty damned good and gets its official release this week, when yet another locally penned novel crashes on the desk. Literally too: Mark Gimenez's second book, The Abduction, weighs in at 503 pages. As memory serves, that's a wee bit bigger than his swell debut, The Color of Law -- or The Colour of Law, as it's known in England. (Incidentally, that book sold 400,000 copies worldwide -- not too effin' shabby, eh?) But according to a glowing review on Amazon's U.K. Web site, it doesn't read quite so long:
I bought this book at the airport on my way to Italy recently thinking it would last me a few days. I ended up staying up most of the night to finish it.Turns out, the former Dallas attorney, who now lives in Bedford, saw his second novel released overseas in March, where it's been a chart-topper in the U.K. and Australia. The Abduction -- about, yes, a child who's kidnapped -- gets its U.S. publication this very month, courtesy Vanguard Press. And 23 pages in, I came across this gem of a paragraph:
But they didn't know Dallas. Keep your prick out of the payroll was a maxim seldom heeded in Big D. To the contrary, humping the help was not considered a crime but instead a perk, something to be praised and pursued, not prosecuted. If the government prosecuted every businessman in Dallas who had used bank money or company money or investor money or city or county or state money to pay for pussy, there wouldn't be enough members left in the chamber of commerce to play gin.Mr. Hunsicker, the bet's to you. And, you, well, you can just fold. --Robert Wilonsky