Herbie's Game

Zusatztext 91737073 Informationen zum Autor Timothy Hallinan is the Lefty Award-winning and Edgar-, Shamus-, and Macavity-nominated author of sixteen widely praised books, including The Fear Artist , Crashed , Little Elvises , and The Fame Thief . After years of working in Hollywood, television, and the music industry, he now writes full-time. He divides his time between California and Thailand. Klappentext Junior Bender, the clown prince of crime fiction, returns in his most hardboiled adventure yet-a tale that will take Junior Bender deep into a murderous conspiracy in present day Los Angeles and uncover an increasingly confusing legacy of his burglar-mentor, Herbie Mott, who until very recently was always one-step-ahead of just about everybody. It's everyday business when Wattles, the San Fernando Valley's top "executive crook," sets up a hit. He establishes a chain of criminals to pass along the instructions and the money, ensuring that the hitter doesn't know who hired him. But one day Wattles finds his office safe open and a single item missing: the piece of paper on which he has written the names of the crooks in the chain. When people associated with the chain begin to pop up dead, the only person Wattles can approach to solve his problem is Junior Bender, professional burglar and begrudging private eye for crooks. But Junior already knows exactly who took Wattles's list: the signature is too obvious. It was Herbie Mott, Junior's burglar mentor-and when Junior seeks him out to discuss the missing list, he finds Herbie very unpleasantly murdered. Junior follows the links in the chain back toward the killer, and as he does, he learns disturbing secrets from Herbie's hidden past. Part I “So you see, kid,” Herbie said, “we’re like Robin Hood. We steal from the rich and we give to the poor.” “How do we give to the poor?” I asked. “I said we were like Robin Hood, not a slavish imitation of Robin Hood.” “So we’re sort of like Robin Hood,” I said. “Yeah,” Herbie said. “If you squint.” Chapter One Ur-Hamlet Eighteen minutes in—just two minutes short of my limit—I was ready to write the place off.         It was a very nice house in a very nice part of the Beverly Hills flats. A very nice car was usually standing in the driveway, a BMW SUV so new the odometer hadn’t hit the hundreds yet, and I could smell that canned new-car fragrance through the closed windows. The locks on the house’s doors, it seemed to me during my week of taking the occasional careless-looking careful look, would yield to a persuasive argument. No bothersome alarm tip-offs. Inside, I was sure, would be a lot of very nice stuff.        And I was right: there was a lot of nice stuff, although most of it was too big to lift. A European sensibility had expressed itself in a lot of stone statuary, some of it very possibly late Roman and some of it, for variety’s sake, Khmer, plus a gorgeous polychrome German Madonna in painted linden wood, possibly from the sixteenth century. As tempting as these pieces were, they were all too heavy to hoist, too bulky to carry, and too hard to fence, especially since my premier fence for fine art, Stinky Tetweiler, and I were on the outs.        So I was adjusting to the idea that the evening would be a write-off as I went very carefully through the drawers in the bedroom, putting everything back exactly where I’d found it and counting down the last ninety seconds. And, as is so often the case, the moment when I gave up was also the moment when fate, with its taste for cheap melodrama, uncoiled itself in the darkness, and my knuckles bounced off one of the things that sends a little sugar bullet straight through a burglar’s heart: a jewelry box. It was cardboard, not velvet, but it was a jewelry box, and it rattled when I picked it up.        Ever since my mentor, Herbie Mott, taught ...

Product details

• Authors: Timothy Hallinan
• Publisher: Soho Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 21.04.2015
• EAN: 9781616955403
• ISBN: 978-1-61695-540-3
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 127 mm x 191 mm x 25 mm
• Series: A Junior Bender Mystery; A Junior Bender Mystery; Junior Bender Mystery
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense