 |
FORGOTTEN BOOK: NIGHT KILLS
review by Jerry House-Jerry's House of Everything
Night Kills by Ed Gorman (1990)
| Kindle Price: | $3.99 |
There are few writers who can
entertain as well as Ed Gorman and this early thriller testifies to that.
Frank Brolan is a partner in a small
Minneapolis advertising agency that is beginning to reach the big-time.
His partner, Stu Foster, has a talent for landing important clients while
Brolan has a gift for the creative side of the business. The two had
been celebrating the signing of an important new client with their staff
and afterwards made their way Brolan's house for something to eat, only to find
the viciously-hacked body of an attractive woman stuffed into Brolin's
freezer. Brolin recognizes the woman as someone with whom he had a loud
public argument with the night before. Because Brolan has a
quick temper and had domestic abuse charges filed against him previously, he is
afraid to go to the police.
The dead woman is a hooker named
Emma. Her neighbor and friend, Greg Wagner, is a short, wheelcar-bound
man with spina bifida. Soon, Wagner and Brolan join forces to try to make
sense of the murder. Meanwhile, a teenage hooker named Denise has been
picked by a bearded man who drives her to a remote spot and tries to strangle
her. Denise is able to get away but not before lifting the man's wallet,
a wallet identifying the attacker as Frank Brolan. Soon, another hooker
is found dead next to one of Brolan's cuff links.
While Brolan, Wagner, and Denise try
to understand what is going on, the reader is treated to a knuckle-biting
ride. Gorman carves his characters with scalpel-like precision, their all
too human foibles laid bare. Gorman has always been the poet of the
underdog, treating them with love and understanding while sometimes subjecting
them to horrific violence. And the author is not above sly digs at the
advertising community, a group he knows all to well.
A darn good book, with only one plot
hole that I could find and that (if you close your eyes hard enough and really,
truly believe in pixies) could be explained by one character's nature.
Recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment