Black Water Shines!
Written: Aug 13 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brilliant writing, plotting, sharp characters
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: As good a thriller as you'll read this summer!
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| dickadler's Full Review: Black Water Transit a Novel Books |
I hope there's a Barnes & Noble in Heaven, so that Richard Condon can get an early copy of this book, which glows with the same fine blend of irony, imagination and insight he brought to his novels. There's a surprise in the form of a thrill or a wry chuckle on virtually every page as Carsten Stroud -- who has previously concentrated on the police side of crime -- creates a large cast of desperate characters shaped but not in the least bit slowed down by the weight of their delusions.
Jack Vermillion, who grew up with mobsters in New York City but runs a straight and successful shipping company in the upstate port city of Troy, was so dazed by a Vietnam leave encounter with a woman named Janice -- who "rode him hard and put him away wet for six days straight, and each time they made love he lost a few more points off his IQ" -- that he never really questioned the fatherhood of his troubled, druggy son Danny, and now is ready to risk his business and his life to get the unlikeable kid a better deal in prison. Casey Spandau, a black New York City policewoman soon to take an active part in Jack's fate, "would tell you, if you let her, that the DEA ran the crack trade and that AIDS was a CIA plot to kill blacks and that Maya Angelou was a great American poet. But she was young, and the young have always been a pain in the a.."
Then there's Earl V. Pike, a truly deadly hand with the world's most frightening sniper weapon, the Barrett Model 82A1, who takes a few minutes off from an important business trip for a bit of lethal road rage. And an equally deadly Federal tarantula named Valeriana Greco, an assistant U.S. attorney who makes nailing Vermillion's skin to her wall an almost psychotic priority. Not to mention an unusually colorful array of gangsters, law enforcement agents, crooked partners and sleazy citizens who crowd the pages of Stroud's impressive and entertaining book but never take away any of its amazing narrative energy.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dickadler
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Member: dick adler
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 13 members
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