Cold Shot to the Heart

November 1, 2010
Stroby (The Barbed-Wire Kiss) pits a resourceful crook against a ruthless killer in this well-crafted crime novel. Crissa Stone carefully weighs risks and rewards and her criminal associates' skills before undertaking a caper. Ex-con Eddie Santiago (aka Eddie the Saint) will kill on principle or for a buck. After one of Stone's men kills Lou Letteri, whom they intended only to rob in a high-stakes Fort Lauderdale, Fla., card game, things go sour in a hurry. Lou was the son-in-law of a Jersey mobster, who hires Santiago to avenge the dead man. When Santiago finds a weak link and starts rolling up the chain leading to Stone, running may not be an option for her as the action builds to the inevitable and exciting showdown.

Starred review from December 1, 2010

Crissa never wants to hurt people. All she wants is their money.

Crissa Stone. Is that her real name? Hard to tell. She's also Roberta Summersfield and Linda Hendryx. She has credit cards serving a variety of names and accounts in multiple banks. Painstakingly, she's prepared herself to vanish at any given moment. She has to. She's a world-class thief. She's learned from the best, but even the best in this chancy vocation is liable to misstep, which is why Wayne Boudreaux, her mentor and lover, is in a Texas slammer with seven years still to serve. Too long, thinks Crissa; prison is murdering him. Wayne has a parole hearing coming up, but there are black marks on his prison record, problems that $250,000 spent cleverly might help erase. To Crissa, that means work she'd have ducked in different circumstances: the hijacking of a high-stakes poker game. There's a fatal shooting—not by Crissa, but that scarcely matters. Suddenly, she's on the run. Someone wants vengeance. Someone else wants the game's takings. Enter Eddie Santiago. He has another name, too. They call him Eddie the Saint, but he's the very devil.

Another fast, taut winner from Stroby (Gone 'til November, 2010, etc.) As for Crissa, she may be crime fiction's best bad girl ever.

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December 1, 2010

Career criminal Crissa Stone and her partner team up to rob a card game where there is rumored to be a half million dollars in play. But when a player with connections to hitman Eddie the Saint is shot during the robbery, the odds turn against Crissa. VERDICT Barry Award finalist Stroby's (Gone 'til November) latest hard-boiled novel is a compelling blend of greed, violence, and the need to survive that will appeal to noir aficionados.

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