I've read and loved the Hap and Leonard books and branched out from there to read Cold In July, a crime novel with a pretty cool twist and a fair pace to it.
Richard Dane is woken in the middle of the night to disturb a burglar. The burglar takes a shot at Dane and Dane fires back. Only one of the bullets hits the target, and the burglar drops to the ground.
The police clear Dane from any respobsibility and it looks like life might return to normal once the sofa is changed and the wall's been painted, only the victim's father has just got out of prison and he's not the sort to take the murder of his son lightly.
The twist, or the first of them, occurs fairly early on and I wouldn't want to continue with any plot description to preserve the surprise for you. What I can say is that a Private Investigator is introduced and that in order to resolve things there are going to be further revelations, scenes of violent action and deepending tensions.
I enjoyed this one well enough, but with a few reservations. There were niggles for me about Dane's actions early on and some of his decisions seemed unlikely. And there's the first-person narrative that doesn't quite bring the depths of the narrator all the way to the surface in the way such a perspective can take.
Overall, a solid and entertaining novel that offers plenty of thrills and spills, but doesn't pack the emotional punch that I get when following Hap and Leonard.
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