Angel Face

October 31, 2011
In this bleak stand-alone from Solomita (Mercy Killing), hit man Leonard Carter unexpectedly meets beautiful call girl Angela “Angel” Tamanaka after Carter fatally shoots one of her clients, mobster Enrico Benedetti (aka Ricky Ditto), at Ricky’s house in the upscale Riverdale section of the Bronx. Carter, a former Delta Force spook who’s killed 23 men in the past two-plus years without being caught, opts to spare Angel, despite the risk of leaving a witness alive. Ricky’s brother, Bobby Ditto, who’s all but certain his brother had a date with a hooker the night of the killing, seeks revenge. After Carter saves Angel from Bobby’s henchmen, Angel points the way to a possible trove of Benedetti cash hidden in a Bronx safe house. The two soon become more than just business partners. Solomita breaks no new ground in this killer for hire tale, but it’s taut and smooth enough to please genre fans.

December 15, 2011
A gorgeous high-class prostitute and a cold-blooded killer meet cute. Angela Tamanaka has spent a lifetime being irresistible. Although her friends call her Angel, an angel she's not. She's a professional hired out to fat-cat clients who can afford to splurge for the special eroticism she brings to her calling. Racketeer Ricky Ditto is one such. It's on entering Ricky's opulent apartment that Angel initially encounters Leonard Carter. He too has a professional engagement with Ricky, in fulfillment of which he neatly places a bullet hole in the middle of the gangster's forehead. Carter's no angel either. He's ex–Special Forces, having spent a decade fighting and killing in the hardest places the U.S. deploys its military. More recently, however, he's gone into business for himself, taking on the sort of contract work of the kind that's introduced him to Ricky. Stunned by the swiftness of it all, a terrified Angel can only assume that she's next, that this super cool and competent hit man will choose to eliminate witnesses, but when his first words to her are "Did you touch anything?" she rightly concludes that he, like the many others before him, has been well and truly smitten. So bad boy meets naughty girl, they click, have great sex, then team together to chase the MacGuffin: $500,000 of someone else's payoff. Solomita (Mercy Killing, 2010, etc.) serves up a spare, fast, unlikely noir romance that turns out to be highly entertaining.

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

October 15, 2011
Six years out of the army, in which he was a member of the elite Delta Force, Leonard Carter is a New York hit man, but he only eliminates people on the wrong side of the law. When he shoots mobster Ricky Ditto, he's confronted with an unexpected witness, beautiful prostitute Angela (Angel) Tamanaka, known to her clients as Angel Face. Since Carter expects that the cops and Ricky's vengeful brother, Bobby, may be after both him and Angel, the two form an alliance, not only for protection but also to recover a large cache of money that Ricky claimed to possess. For intelligence help, Carter enlists his former antagonist, Lieutenant Solly Epstein of the NYPD Organized Crime Control Bureau, who has money problems. Carter, humanized by his grief over the death of his sister, seems virtually invincible as he tackles the bad guys in front of him. Like Dexter, he is a mass murderer who commands sympathy, and, as the ending hints, he appears to have an intriguing future ahead of him. Top-notch hard-boiled crime fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)