Cracked

September 14, 2015
Danielle “Danny” Cleary, the potty-mouthed narrator of Canadian author Leslie’s dark comic debut, the first of a trilogy, is jolted out of a crack binge by news that her fraternal twin sister, Ginger, is dead. With Darren, her rock musician brother, Danny leaves Toronto for Ginger’s swanky home in Orange County, Calif. Crack highs alternate with bouts of withdrawal vomiting and diarrhea as Danny sets out to find Ginger’s missing twin boys and take revenge on the person who killed her sister. Ginger, who started her drug habit after she lost the love of her life, manages to stay detoxed enough to put her preaddiction martial arts training to gory use. Along the way, the emotionally damaged Danny discovers that strangers will help her after all. This welter of drug-scene violence, with its sordid details of Danny’s crack addiction, far-out fanciful plot twists, and shallow characterizations, won’t be to every taste.

September 15, 2015
An aggressive drug addict is determined to find the connection between her twin's death and her own life. No one sets out to be an addict, but when Jack, her husband and the love of her life, goes around the bend, Danielle "Danny" Cleary starts on a habit she can't stop. One day, years after their split, Danny's hanging around with her partner in addiction, Gene, waiting for their dealer, D-Man, to front them a little something. She's tried to drop off the face of the Earth and doesn't even pick up the phone when it rings, since most of her callers are credit card companies anyway. That's how she ends up hearing about the death of her twin sister, Ginger, on a voice mail message. Ginger had the life that Danny meant to have. She married Fred, her high school sweetheart, had kids, and became an Orange County housewife. Danny was too ashamed to admit her lifestyle to Ginger, but Ginger may have known more than Danny thought, or so Fred says when he blames her for Ginger's death. Although Ginger was found with a syringe in her arm, Danny knows she was no addict and thinks the scene may have been set up by someone connected to her. Already out for revenge, Danny is pushed a step too far when a woman posing as her takes off with Ginger's twin sons-and that's just the beginning. Leslie can get overwrought, and she kills off a surprising number of characters in the first book of a planned trilogy. But her writing style and twists can be addictive, even if they're not crack.

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October 15, 2015
Danny Cleary is a crackhead. Once a trained and toned martial-arts fighter, she descended into addiction after leaving her beloved but mentally unstable husband. Then her twin sister, Ginger, who is like a part of herself, is found dead in a sleazy motel, murdered but posed as a suicide. Danny and her younger brother, Darren, leave for Southern California and learn both that Ginger's husband is accused of his wife's death and that the couple's 11-year-old twin sons have been snatched by someone posing as Danny. This leaves Danny as hungry for revenge as for crack. As action ricochets between Palm Springs, Toronto, and Maine, and as it becomes increasingly hard to tell good guys from bad, an evil group called the Family emerges as responsible for the mayhem. This first book of an intended trilogy takes readers on a Quentin Tarantinostyle roller-coaster ride, with wry humor, a graphic body count, and lots of drug detail. Not for all tastes, but readers with strong stomachs and a tolerance for extreme noir will want to see what comes next.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)