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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Just Finished Reading: The Girl with the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block

Johnny Hayden in an ex-grifter, an ex-conman. He’s also an ex-con having served two years in San Quentin. He now works as the night manager in a bowling alley and dreams of owning his own restaurant. Enter ex-partner Doug Rance with the perfect scheme. He is planning to fleece big time real estate entrepreneur Wallace Gunderman for $100,000 – more than enough for Johnny to buy his dream. The plan is perfect and cannot fail because Doug has someone on the inside – Gunderman’s long suffering girlfriend who wants to hurt him bad. Against his better judgement Johnny agrees to run one last con. But it’s not long before he realises that there are two cons running and that he might be on the sticky end of at least one of them.

After quite a gap I had decided to give the Hard Case Crime series another shot. After reading three books in this series so far I must admit that I haven’t been particularly impressed. This book is one of the best so far and has, at least partially, renewed my faith in things. It was well written, well paced and certainly kept me guessing almost to the end. I liked the ending too – nothing too dramatic or too flat. Overall the characterisation was pretty good as was the scam itself and the whole feel of things. Not exactly top class literature – not that I was really expecting anything of that quality – but good, solid, page turning stuff and whilst I didn’t exactly become attached to the characters as I sometimes do in novels I was interested enough in how things were panning out that I kept on turning those pages. Reasonable.

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