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Gas City |
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Gas City |
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基本信息·出版社：Forge Books
·页码：304 页
·出版日期：2008年01月
·ISBN：076531956X
·International Standard Book Number：076531956X
·条形码：9780765319562
·EAN：9780765319562
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语
内容简介 Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces—greed and corruption, ambition and desire—run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage. A power struggle—between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp, and media reporters looking for a big story—turns what has been a minor dispute into a desperate struggle for survival. Setting this drama in a blue-collar metropolis dominated by an oil company, Estleman, with an unerring eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue that reveals the secret desires of his characters, crafts a fascinating, deadly tapestry of love, ambition, revenge, and redemption, a stunning portrait of the human condition.
作者简介 Loren D. Estleman has written more than sixty novels. His books have won four Shamus Awards, five Golden Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards. He lives in central Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.
媒体推荐 Praise for Gas City:
“Loren D. Estleman's knife-edged serial-killer thriller, Gas City is pared to its very bone… Estleman, in the leanest prose possible, brings to life not just his characters but the vices that fuel them and, in the process, exposes the gritty, ragged, sordid underbelly of urban life. He's been called an heir to Chandler — and it's easy to see why.” A —Entertainment Weekly
“Shamus-winner Estleman, best known for his hard-boiled Amos Walker series (American Detective, etc.), creates a new, morally complex world in this razor-sharp tale of crime and corruption in a fictional eastern U.S. city.... will justly be compared with that of James Ellroy's Los Angeles noir mysteries and John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions. Admirers of unsparing crime fiction will hope that Estleman plans to visit Gas City again.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“May be the prolific Estleman’s most thought-provoking and emotionally engaging novel among the 60 or so he’s written. Its subject is contemporary rust-belt politics as a human phenomenon and the way that a politician’s compromises can affect both the citizenry at large and the individuals who make up that citizenry. Each of the half-dozen plotlines is executed flawlessly and presented in a context of moral ambiguity in which every choice—whether self-serving or altruistic—has consequences both good and evil. A magnificent crime novel.”
— Booklist (Starred Review)
“Portrait of a city by an old master... The chronically undervalued Estleman ( American Detective, 2007, etc.) serves up what just might be the best novel about urban political corruption since Dashiel Hammett's The Glass Key.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
专业书评 From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Shamus-winner Estleman, best known for his hard-boiled Amos Walker series (
American Detective, etc.), creates a new, morally complex world in this razor-sharp tale of crime and corruption in a fictional eastern U.S. city. Gas City, once known as Garden Grove, has enjoyed stability as a result of understandings among the politicians, the police and the local gangsters. An enclave known as the Circle serves as the community's vice outlet, while the rest of the metropolis is virtually crime free. Police chief Francis Russell, after his wife's death, begins to question the devil's bargain he'd struck years earlier with mob boss Anthony Zeno. When Russell resumes acting like a lawman, virtually everyone in town feels the repercussions. Estleman masterfully creates a wide and diverse cast of characters, and sympathetically portrays their struggles to survive on the mean streets. A superfluous serial killer subplot doesn't detract from the author's achievement, which will justly be compared with that of James Ellroy's Los Angeles noir mysteries and John Gregory Dunne's
True Confessions. Admirers of unsparing crime fiction will hope that Estleman plans to visit Gas City again.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist*Starred Review* Francis X. Russell is Gas City’s chief of police. For many years, he has maintained a gentleman’s agreement with the local Mob boss, Anthony Zeno. The drugs, the illegal gambling, and the hookers stay within a small, clearly defined area of the city. In return, Russell receives financial consideration, and the city at large remains relatively crime free. When Russell’s wife of 30-plus years succumbs to cancer, the chief has a crisis of conscience and begins raids into the restricted area. The repercussions are significant with a mayoral race approaching. Political alliances are altered, Zeno loses the endorsement of the out-of-town crime hierarchy to which he reports, Mob-controlled unions threaten strikes, and even the city’s powerful Catholic church is knocked off balance. Mix in a serial killer dubbed “Beaver Cleaver” by the media and a doomed love affair between a disgraced cop and a hooker for what may be the prolific Estleman’s most thought-provoking and emotionally engaging novel among the 60 or so he’s written. Its subject is contemporary rust-belt politics as a human phenomenon and?the way that a politician’s compromises can affect both the citizenry at large and the individuals who make up?that citizenry. Each of the half-dozen plotlines is executed flawlessly and presented in a context of moral ambiguity in which every choice—whether self-serving or altruistic—has consequences both good and evil. A magnificent crime novel. --Wes Lukowsky
文摘 Excerpt
A couple of days before Arch Killian’s seventy-eighth birthday, he mentioned to his son that he’d outlived all his old friends and no one was left to serve as his pallbearer.
His son said, “Dad, isn’t that the idea?”
“Not when I was young. The idea was to go first and leave a lot of people to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“You’re just used to me.”
It occurred to Arch too that he was one of the few left who had a personal memory of the original Morse McGrath. The number of those who even remembered a time when the old man was alive was small, and each new harvest of obituaries in The Derrick made him wonder if he was going to keel off his porch some morning and be written up in the almanac like the last passenger pigeon. Or more accurately the last gray bird who had seen one.
He remembered that encounter every morning, when his doctor-mandated three-mile walk took him to the top of Factory Hill. That was the moment the sun struck orange crucifixes off the onion-shaped storage tanks belonging to the McGrath refinery. The play of light, crowned by the eternal flame fluttering atop the two-hundred-foot stack, painted an abstract picture of the man who had built it: fierce and florid, ablaze with a self-faith that at times licked over into fanatic, then in his final years burned there perpetually.
Arch had been twenty-six then, and had worked for Carbon Valley Surveying eighteen months. The job involved searching for buried irons and sighting along ranks of trees with ancient rusted fencing grown into the goitered trunks—in effect, reasserting property lines through archaeology. Most of the boundaries had grown over, with only the odd spent shotgun shell or calcified condom to imply the existence of civilization. He’d been bitten by stray dogs, set aflame by poison ivy, and served a feast to ticks a
……
