Wallace Stroby

Sara's doing the best she can. Her life isn't the easiest what with being an officer in the boy's club of a small central Florida Sheriff's office and a single mom to a son with leukemia. Things don't improve when she responds to a call one night for a roadside shooting and find her ex-boyfriend is the cop and he's shot a young man. Everything looks by-the-book, but as Sara looks at things, they don't piece together as well as they should.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, a drug lord worries when a show more delivery to a new supplier down south goes missing. He asks Morgan, an old school enforcer with issues of his own, to go and find out what happened.

Wallace Stroby is fantastic at creating reprehensible characters who are, if not exactly likeable, then interesting and compelling. Everything's in shades of gray, including the people; what's interesting is how they deal with what they've been dealt. Morgan isn't a good guy, but you can't help but sigh with him over how the business has changed and how his profession doesn't favor the long-lived. Sara's fantastic; tough and committed to doing a good job both as a cop and a mother, but her weakness for the feckless Billy is understandable. He may always make the wrong life choices, but he has a certain charm.

Gone 'Til November is pure modern noir, full of atmosphere, gunshots and run-down bars with gravel lots. show less

The best thriller I've read in a long time. Stroby writes with the drive of Stark and the heart of the great journalist he is... No one working today matches that perfect balance of lean prose, gripping story, and humanity.

With the exception of Elmore Leonard, I'm generally not that interested in crime novels. I read Leonard for the sharply drawn characters and the wit, not the crime. So I picked up Cold Shot to the Heart with some trepidation, but the promise of a female protagonist intrigued me. It wasn't long before Wallace Stroby had me hooked and I found myself for the first time in a long time thinking, "Just one more chapter and then I'll stop." This went on for a few hours and I pretty much read the show more whole thing in one sitting.

Crissa Stone is a professional thief whose cool head and steady hand make her well-suited to the volatile situations that tend to present themselves when you're trying to forcibly take someone else's dough. After a disappointing haul from her last heist, Crissa is drawn into a scheme to rob an illegal big stakes poker tournament. Of course, easy money is seldom easy and when things go wrong, Crissa finds herself matching wits with Eddie "The Saint" Santiago, a recently released convict with homicidal tendencies who is hellbent on getting Crissa's score at any cost.

Stroby's fast pacing and dialogue driven narrative are reminiscent of Leonard, though his characters don't follow Leonard's smart-ass-with-a-glib-tongue template. In that sense, Stroby's characters seem more realistic, but they're not quite as entertaining. Crissa Stone, however, makes an intriguing protagonist. Crissa doesn't just steal for the thrill of it, nor does she do it just for herself. Her primary motivation is that she's got bills to pay in the form of care for a daughter who doesn't even know her and bribes to spring her significant other, Wayne, from a Texas prison. She seems a woman trapped by circumstance--crime is all she knows and the only way she can make the big money necessary to protect those she loves. Separated from her daughter and her lover, she leads a solitary, painfully lonesome existence when not on the job. Being a female also gets her into some hot water. She's not as comfortable with violence as some of her male counterparts and it's her nature to avoid conflict that ends up creating some of her most dangerous enemies. But make no mistake--she's not a tragic, weak character and these same qualities also allow Crissa to kick ass when the situation calls for it.

Overall, Cold Shot to the Heart is a fast, entertaining read and I'll definitely seek out the other books in the series.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder show less

I was prepared to like The Devil's Share far more than I did. The thought of a female thief was enough to get me interested and it was highly recommended by someone.

I might give another Crissa Stone novel a go, but I had to stick with this one for awhile before I could get into it. I remember someone saying once that the villian should be smarter than your hero; the bad guys here aren't necessarily smarter but they are far more ruthless. I found it hard to believe that Crissa could not have show more planned for what happened, or at least been mentally prepared. I also found it hard to believe that she would take on a for-hire job and not be in charge, or know, each of her crew herself. That's putting trust at the point of naivete. Hard to believe if she is as good as she is supposed to be.

It seems as if, these days, to be a 'strong female' just means that you have to take a physical beating and come out of it alive. Brains and common sense don't seem to be necessary. It's turning into a pet peeve and making it harder and harder for me to find female characters that I really like. show less