Richard Lange. (2017). The Smack: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Richard Lange. 2017. The Smack: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Richard Lange, The Smack: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

Richard Lange. The Smack: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

OverDrive Product Record

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title

The Smack

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   • fileAs: Lange, Richard
   • bioText: Richard Lange is the author of the story collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the International Association of Crime Writers' Hammett Prize, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Los Angeles.
   • name: Richard Lange

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2017-07-18T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Smack

fullDescription

Rowan Petty is a conman down on his luck. He's flat broke, living out of cheap hotels, and wondering how it all went wrong. His car quits on him in Reno, and he takes a job there on the bottom rung of a lousy phone scam. When he's not swindling lonely widows, he tries to turn nickels into dimes at the poker table.
One snowy night, he crosses paths with a sweet-talking hooker who's tired of the streets, and sparks fly. When an old friend of his turns up spreading a rumor about two million dollars in army money smuggled out of Afghanistan and stashed in an apartment in Los Angeles, it seems like a chance at the score of a lifetime. So Petty and the hooker head south, and straight into trouble.
A wounded vet, a washed-up actor, and Petty's estranged daughter are all players in the dangerous game they find themselves caught up in. For the winner: a fortune. For the loser: a bullet to the head. Propulsive, suspenseful, and written with a searing lyricism, The Smack shows once again that "Lange is a writer firing on all cylinders who belongs in the top tier of novelists working today" ( Omaha World-Herald).

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Bill Ott, Booklist
   • content: With all the dexterity of Thomas Perry, Lange walks the thin line between caper novel and blood-splattered noir, leading up to a rip-roaring finale. This fine piece of tragicomic crime fiction sets up like a stand-alone, but we'd sure like to see more.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Joe Ide, author of IQ
   • content: The characters are real and satisfying, the relationships will warm your heart and break it at the same time. The Smack is convincing, hectic and terrific fun.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Adam Sternbergh, author of Shovel Ready
   • content: If Elmore Leonard and Dennis Cooper collaborated on a novel, they might produce something as exciting, harrowing and emotionally powerful as The Smack. Call it a literary thriller or call it thrilling literature—Richard Lange is emerging as the master of a new kind of novel: One that delivers breathless, gripping action while anchored in the authentic troubles of the real world. The Smack arrives like a genuine miracle—that rare thriller that will jack your pulse even as it breaks your heart.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Joe Ide, author of IQ
   • content: It's hard to imagine Richard Lange wasn't, in some previous life, a hustler from Reno with a girlfriend named Tinafey he met on a professional date who goes to LA to steal a fortune from a one-legged soldier home from Afghanistan and a host of other terrifying individuals. The characters are real and satisfying, the relationships will warm your heart and break it at the same time. The Smack is convincing, hectic and terrific fun.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Tom Cooper, author of The Marauders
   • content: The Smack just might be Mr. Lange's best yet, and that's saying something. His Los Angeles tableau of concrete and graffiti and neon is as sharp as razor wire. The characters are authentic down to the bone, the dialogue pitch-perfect believable, the desperation palpable, the situation urgent, the story riveting. Simply put, The Smack wallops you upside the head with its bad-ass-ness.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Gerald Petievich, author of To Live and Die in L.A. and The Sentinel
   • content: The Smack is much more than a crime novel. It is a novel about life itself. The secret to great writing isn't just to observe. It's to create a world that readers understand at least as well as they do their own. Richard Lange has accomplished this, and more. His sensitivity and pacing are reminiscent of Raymond Carver, Charles Willeford, and Jim Thompson.
7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 22, 2017
     Career con artist Rowan Petty has run out of luck in this gritty, poignant crime novel from Hammett Prize–winner Lange (Angel Baby). Living out of a hotel in Reno, Nev., Petty is down to his last five grand and trying to stay afloat working various phone scams for chump change. When an older criminal colleague approaches Petty with a story he heard in prison about $2 million in stolen army money smuggled out of Afghanistan into L.A., Petty is just desperate enough to take the bait. Accompanied by a down-on-her-luck prostitute who calls herself Tinafey, Petty heads to California. Things get complicated and violent quickly, as Petty discovers that he isn’t the only one looking for the stolen cash. Meanwhile, he makes contact with his estranged daughter, whose life has taken a difficult turn. Lange is a master at writing about characters on the margins of society and humanizing outcasts and misfits, and he manages to capture the surreal culture of Los Angeles in all its contradictory glory. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 15, 2017
     Down-on-his-luck grifter Rowan Petty is talked into taking part in an iffy get-rich scheme by Dandy Don, an ex-con in Reno, only to be set up for a fall.A crew of Afghanistan soldiers in cahoots with Afghan truckers has siphoned $2 million in ghost payments and kickbacks to Los Angeles, where it has been hidden by Tony, a wounded young veteran. Don promises Petty a big chunk of the cash if he can put his hands on it. Posing as a plumber, Petty searches the kid's apartment for a possible hiding place. An armed thug sent by Don bursts in demanding the money and is shot dead by Tony, who is so rattled by the thought of going to prison that he offers Petty a share of the $2 million if he takes care of the body. Petty devises a scam to abscond with all the money. Standing in his way is Diaz, the coldblooded vet behind the original theft, who is back in the U.S. Petty's situation is further complicated by two women: Tinafey, a smart and sassy hooker he falls for, and his long-estranged 21-year-old daughter, Samantha, who is diagnosed with a serious medical problem. As he did in the gritty Angel Baby (2013), Lange brings a fresh dimension to noir by making parenthood a central theme (Petty's father was a failed gambler). Petty's romance with Tinafey, who becomes his reluctant accomplice, can get a bit squishy. Like his protagonist, Lange "ha[s] a soft spot for hookers." But he is such a breezy, stylish writer that even scenes that in other hands would be filler, like those in which Petty indulges Tinafey's shopping and sightseeing desires, have something to reveal. In this breezy page-turner, Lange shows off his uncommon ability to combine toughness and tenderness.

     COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 1, 2017
     Con artist Rowan Petty has endured a long run of bad luck. Then, on a snowy Thanksgiving Day in Reno, two things happen: Rowan meets an old friend, who tells him about $2 million in cash smuggled out of Afghanistan, cash that may now be languishing in Los Angeles, prime for the pickings. The same night, Rowan meets a prostitute and feels a connection (not just the kind she's selling). Our melancholy con man initially says no to both offers, then changes his mind, first about hooking up with Tinafey ( like that white girl on TV but one word ), then about L.A. It all goes swimmingly at first, with con man and working girl impersonating La La Land tourists, until the clouds roll in. Encounters with the smugglers result in dead bodies, and gradually Rowan realizes that he's on the wrong end of a multilevel con. With all the dexterity of Thomas Perry, Lange walks the thin line between caper novel and blood-splattered noir, leading up to a rip-roaring finale. This fine piece of tragicomic crime fiction sets up like a stand-alone, but we'd sure like to see more of Rowan and Tinafey.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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Rowan Petty is a conman down on his luck. He's flat broke, living out of cheap hotels, and wondering how it all went wrong. His car quits on him in Reno, and he takes a job there on the bottom rung of a lousy phone scam. When he's not swindling lonely widows, he tries to turn nickels into dimes at the poker table.
One snowy night, he crosses paths with a sweet-talking hooker who's tired of the streets, and sparks fly. When an old friend of his turns up spreading a rumor about two million dollars in army money smuggled out of Afghanistan and stashed in an apartment in Los Angeles, it seems like a chance at the score of a lifetime. So Petty and the hooker head south, and straight into trouble.
A wounded vet, a washed-up actor, and Petty's estranged daughter are all players in the dangerous game they find themselves caught up in. For the winner: a fortune. For the loser: a bullet to the head. Propulsive, suspenseful, and written with a searing lyricism, The Smack...

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