Cold Shot to the Heart

*Crissa Stone is a career criminal. A complete pro, she never works too close to her New York City home, rarely signs on with the same crew, and never rushes a job. These are the rules that have kept her from getting caught, from doing time. They’re the rules her mentor and lover taught her, rules he didn’t follow as closely as he should’ve. Now he’s up for parole, and Crissa needs to come up with some real money real fast to help grease the wheels.

Word is that there’s an illegal card game set for less than a week from now. The take? As much as seven figures. Desperate, Crissa slaps a plan and a crew together.

It’s robbery, not murder. But when one of her crew loses his cool and they have to abandon the plan, she catches the attention of Eddie the Saint. A hit man recently released from prison, Eddie is no less of a pro than Crissa, and he could use the work, not to mention all that money.

One of the most talented writers working in crime fiction today, Wallace Stroby has written a tight, propulsive story that will hold readers captive until well after all the crooks have fled the scene.

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. (Jan.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This is a raw, hard-edged, noirish novel, dark and violent. It’s good, too, with a plot easy enough to follow without too much back-paging and a heroine who listens to Bach between gun battles and turns out to be surprisingly likable. Crissa Stone is a robber for hire, now employed by a mobster who wants her and two cronies to break into a Fort Lauderdale hotel and bust up a card game that has a million bucks on the table. The three miscreants decide to rappel down the side of the building. The scenes of preparation and execution are chilling. But the heist goes wrong. A man is killed because, we’re told, one of the gunmen spooked. But maybe not. Could the caper be disguised murder for hire? Why else does Crissa suddenly find herself pursued by a reptile called Eddie the Saint? Their clashes are cinematic: hurtling cars and bloodstained snow. Stroby has been called a nascent Crumley or Pelecanos. He shares their sense that cynicism is the last pose left to a romantic. --Don Crinklaw