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2.0 out of 5 stars
not his best-he had a orthodontic bill, maybe?, Dec 25 2000
I like Jim Thompson. Good Thompson books are solid 3's and 3 1/2's with me. This is not a good Thompson book.He does hard-boiled right, with dialogue breaking over the ear like music. Paranoia? Oh boy, can he invoke it, and personify it in characters haunted by less than ideal situations! You don't know who to trust and the pace keeps you turning pages. And that might describe this book were it not for the last pages. I can deal with multiple betrayal and keep that stuff if not squared in my own head, then at least reasonably coherent. But these female characters are complex to the point of unbelievability. I won't 'spoil' this for you, but given what we know and have seen, having it end like it did and with whom we've met is akin to entering your kitchen pantry and expecting to emerge in downtown Peking. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE. Worse, it's capital B bathos. Plausibility takes a U-turn into a 'happy ending' which has all marks of why certain people distrust and even dislike happy endings. I don't have this problem, but this books ends with a prototypical example of a bad happy ending. The last pages are as if Judith Light and Tony Danza (of 80's sitcom Who's the Boss?) were asked to collaborate on a script for a pilot episode of husband and wife crime-fighting tv series they would star in. It's that bad. The 'romantic dialogue' might've been lifted from a movie of the kind you see for free in certain by the hour motels. Hideous. Read Getaway or After Dark, My Sweet instead and skip this strictly 'For the Money' piece of Thompson's oevre. k
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