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Informationen zum Autor THOMAS PERRY is the author of the Jane Whitefield series as well as the best-selling novels Nightlife, Death Benefits, and Pursuit. He won the Edgar Award for The Butcher’s Boy , and Metzger’s Dog was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Klappentext A New York Times Notable Crime Book. "An amazingly entertaining crime novel" from the New York Times best-selling author of the Butcher's Boy thrillers (Chicago Sun-Times, Favorite Books of the Year). An aging but formidable strip club owner, Claudiu "Manco" Kapak, has been robbed by a masked gunman as he placed his cash receipts in a bank's night-deposit box. Enraged, he sends his half-dozen security men out to find a suspect who is spending lots of cash and is new enough to Los Angeles not to know he was robbing a gangster. Their search leads them to Joe Carver, an innocent but hardly defenseless newcomer who evades capture and sets out to make Kapak wish he'd chosen someone else. Meanwhile, the real culprit, Jefferson Davis Falkins, and his new girlfriend Carrie seem to believe they've found a whole new profession: robbing Manco Kapak. Lieutenant Nick Slosser, the police detective in charge of the puzzling and increasingly violent case, has his own troubles, including worries about how he's going to afford to send the oldest child of each of his two bigamous marriages to college without making their mothers suspicious. As this odd series of difficulties explodes into a triple killing, Carver finds himself in the middle of a brewing gang war over Kapak's little empire, while Falkins and Carrie journey into territory more strange and violent than either had imagined. One of Stephen King's "Must-Reads for Summer" (Entertainment Weekly) "Perry is at his wicked best in Strip."?New York Times "[A] rambunctiously entertaining L.A. crime novel . . . escapist reading at its best."?Publishers Weekly (starred review) Leseprobe 1 THE TIMES CAME OFTEN when Joe Carver felt like retreating from Los Angeles into the hinterland, maybe the sparsely populated northern plains. But the frequency of these urges meant little. They were weaker and less insistent every time, and by now they were only uneasy instants, like skipped heartbeats. He had chosen to come to Los Angeles, and some choices could be permanent. He couldn’t go back now to some place where just being alive was work. It was as though when he had crossed the California line, he had stepped off a cliff. There was no way back up. Carver had always been smart enough to know that when he did anything he was choosing to let a thousand other things remain undone, dooming them to nonexistence. But he was also wise enough not to allow himself to waste much time thinking about all of those unborn futures. Carver raised his head slowly and carefully and peered downward from the cab of the tower crane at the world two hundred and fifty feet below him. The construction of the big ugly office building was going very well. The steel I-beams were being assembled in a rigid Tinkertoy framework very efficiently, and he could see piles of lumber in the yard below him that indicated the next step would be to add to the flooring that had already been laid on the lowest levels. Carver could evaluate this building’s progress with something of an expert eye, because he had been sleeping here each night for weeks. Large commercial projects like this were the best protected from thieves and vandals, and they were the most comfortable because there were pieces of heavy equipment with cabs for shelter and seat cushions he could use for a bed. He didn’t like the look of the site tonight. The crews had been accelerating for weeks. Soon he would have to stop sleeping in the cab of the big crane, and that disappointed him. There were other places for him, but they were all inferior to the tower crane. On this si...
