Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot

May 16, 2011
In Compton's searing sequel to Hailey's War, Hailey Cain, tough girl/West Point dropout, resurfaces in Los Angeles as second-in-command enforcer to Serena "Warchild" Delgadillo, the leader of a Latina female gang. Rejected by the Army because of a brain tumor she knows will kill her, and rejected as well by her adored cousin CJ, who can't manage the unconventional lifestyle that allows Hailey to cope with her shortened life, Hailey plunges into a maelstrom of hijacking, deadly gang rivalry, and identity theft. Her sense of justice eventually carries this "morally compromised" but eerily compelling heroine into the hands of "the feared LAPD gang-intelligence officer," Magnus Ford. Ford offers Hailey a brutally convincing escape from a world that allows girls so little opportunity that they become more lethal than the male criminals who prey on them, but her personal code demands a heavy price. Readers fascinated by Hailey's conflict between her aching heart and her canny head will hope she continues raising Cain. 

August 1, 2011

This time out, Hailey Cain—the woman who doesn't know fear because, well, she can't—finds herself framed and on the run.

Hailey, 24, has a brain tumor. It's degenerative, inoperable and will kill her before she's 30, doctors have told her. Can there possibly be an upside to this Job-like litany? Yes, in a way, though it zig-zags. The fact is Hailey's been rendered fearless. Symptom-free otherwise, it's in the pathology of her rare and terrible disease that she is, as she puts it, "simply never afraid." An enviable thing, some might say, except that it got her tossed out of the United States Military Academy, where in her fourth year she'd stood close to the top of her class. Understandably, West Point brass viewed with alarm the idea of a commander whose need for caution as a tactical element is nonexistent. So there's unhappy Hailey with a barracks bag full of sharply honed military skills and no place to use them. Enter cherished high-school friend Serena, who happens also to be chieftain of a major L.A. street gang; somehow, it seems in the natural order of things for Hailey to become her second in command. But now, suddenly, up north in San Francisco another Hailey flashes, fake of course, engaged in behavior that could have truly unpleasant consequences for the real one. Spurious Hailey is wanted in a double homicide: an heiress and a cop, too, which goes to the heart of why the SFPD is hell-bent on bringing her to justice. But where is she? And perhaps even more to the point as far as Hailey is concerned, who is she?

Addictive. Though Compton (Hailey's War, 2010, etc.) veers closer here than a good writer should to a kind of Rambo-ized chick lit, Hailey's comet continues to shine.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2011
Operating under her own moral code as second in command of an L.A. Latina gang, 24-year-old Hailey Cain breaks the lawby robbing a pharmaceutical companys delivery trucks, along with gang leader Serena Delgadillobut stops short of killing, even in revenge for being shot and mutilated (in Haileys War, 2010). When two people are murdered, one of them a cop, and physical evidence makes Hailey the sole suspect and object of a manhunt, she sets out to find the person who stole her identity and set her up. Discharged years earlier from West Point because of an inoperable brain tumor (that will likely lead to an early death but meanwhile causes her to feel no fear), Hailey has a limited network of persons to ask for help, but she finds an unlikely ally in Magnus Ford, the feared LAPD gang-intelligence officer known as Shadow Man. Smart and physically skilled, Hailey is a complex character whose exploits make adrenaline-producing reading, and the resolution here bodes well for the future of this compelling series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)