Blurb:
Ex-con
and professional poker player Timothy Waverly travels to Traverse City,
Michigan for a break…and falls into bed with a seductress named Midnight. She’s
an out-of-towner, too, there to rescue her self-destructive brother, who has
stupidly ripped off a fortune in cocaine from a vicious Chicago mobster. Now
she is being chased by Shadow, a hemorrhoidal hitman who gleefully specializes
in torture and rape, and Gleep, his muscle-bound henchman. The odds are stacked
against her, but Waverly is a gambler who knows how to play them…
Review by Rochelle Weber:
When
I was in my first semester of writing at Columbia College, Chicago, the men in
my stories were too polite, so my professor made me read a book called Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Herbert Selby, Jr. Much of it was
stream-of-consciousness profanity. If you aren’t familiar with stream-of-consciousness
writing, it has no punctuation, capitalization, sentence structure or
paragraphs.
Itsasthoughyourewritingadreamjusthewayyousawitandifyouwantanevenbetterexampletry
The Sound and the Fury by William
Faulkner. The loosest I was able to get was having my pipe-fitter hero’s
buddies meet him for breakfast the day after he meets my heroine and the
conversation went something like:
“Hey
John, how was last night? That was some hot piece you left with.”
“The
Lady I left with was very nice, and it
ain’t none a your business.”
It
just about killed me to call my heroine a “piece,” to use the word “ain’t” and
to use a double-negative.
If
a writer came to me now and said, “Rochelle, I want to write a realistic thug,”
this is the series of books to which I would refer him or her.
I
didn’t like most of the people in this book. Waverly, the “hero,” makes his
living by ripping off people at card tables, a dubious skill he honed as a way
of preserving his sanity while in solitary confinement in prison. Clay Clemmons
is a rich-kid drug dealer who decides to rip off half a million in drugs from
his boss in Traverse City, Michigan, not realizing the drugs are really the
property of the Chicago mob. He calls his sister, Holly (Midnight to her
closest friends), to come and rescue him. Shadow and Gleep, the thugs tasked
with retrieving the mob’s drugs decide to flush him out by grabbing Midnight. Waverly
has some redeeming qualities. He steps in and rescues Midnight when Shadow and
Gleep accost her in the parking lot of an Indian casino outside of Traverse
City. Midnight is a Princess in every sense of the word. Beautiful,
entitled—she assumes Waverly will simply continue to help her because crooks
her well-manicured finger at him. And he does. Along the way, a lot of people
die horrible deaths. The men in this book think and speak almost entirely in
profanity. Women don’t have names. They aren’t even “pieces.” They’re the
c-word or “snatch.”
Yet,
these characters are deeply drawn. There’s a reason each of them turned out the
way they did. They have back-stories. Despite my distaste for them, I kept
reading. Right up to the cliff-hanger ending. Yes, this was Book One of a
series, so it didn’t quite end. Part of me wants to say, life doesn’t quite
end, either. But apparently there are more books that continue the story.
If
you’re looking for a romance with nice people and a happily ever after, this
book is not for you. If you’re looking for a huge dose of the seedy side of
life occupied by thugs and realistic mafia hitmen, then the Waverly series is a
great example. If your heroes are too polite and you need to learn how to write
more realistic thugs, here’s your textbook. Despite the fact that I didn’t
really like this book, I have to admire its craftwork. That’s why I gave it
four roses.
Length: 304 Pages
Prices:
Print: $13.99
Digital: $3.99
You’ll
notice we always include the publisher’s buy link. That’s because authors
usually receive 40% of the book price from the publisher. Editors and cover
artists usually receive about 5%. When you buy a book from Amazon, Barnes &
Noble or another third-party vendor, they take a hefty cut and the author,
editors and cover artists receive their cuts from what is left. So, if a book
costs $5.99 at E-Book Publisher.com and you buy from there, the author will
receive about $2.40. If you buy the book at Amazon, the author will receive
about $0.83.
Downloading
the file from your computer to your Kindle is as easy as transferring any file
from your computer to a USB flash drive. Plug the larger USB end of your chord
into a USB port on your computer and simply move the file from your “Downloads”
box to your Kindle/Documents/Books directory. You can download your books onto
your computer using “Save As” to a “Books” file you create and sort them into
sub-folders by genre, author, or however you wish before transferring them to your
Kindle. That way, if there’s a glitch with your Kindle, the books are on your
computer. Your author will be happy you did when he/she sees his/her royalty
statement.
No comments:
Post a Comment