4 out of 5

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Sure, it’s a shade too simple, but it’s also an amazingly intense read; a perfect pulp trainwreck of overreactions and impulsive actions that assault the reader – in the blessed tradition of the genre – as soon as the pieces are put in place. And author Gil Brewer’s trick for preventing those quite recognizable pieces from causing boredom during assembly is to have our main character be rather fretfully aware of his actions: Jack knows what the youthful Shirley is up to when she prances around her sick uncle’s home when Jack has been called out to pitch his TV / electronics wares; he’d planned to stay focused on selling her on an intercom setup, fetching a pretty penny in itself, but he goes in whole hog for the routine, unsurprised when there’s a potential payoff should the old man croak… Yes, it’s the “let’s kill ‘im for his money,” setup, with Jack probably focused on the cash and not the girl, but her eagerness makes him sweat plenty all the same, giving his feverish actions a properly hasty feel. Shirley – and the rest of the women in the book – do, unfortunately, fit the rather one-dimensional role femme fatale types often play, but I’d say Jack isn’t given much to work with beyond Selfish Clod, albeit one with enough intelligence that we don’t feel like we’re roped along on a nonsense ride. Rather, the duo do _plan_ things, and plan them effectively enough, but it’s still amateur hour: it’s two people who think it’ll be easy very quickly realizing – when plans inevitably go wrong – that they won’t be.

We’re never quite given a reason that the various women in the book choose to be involved with Jack, who seems pretty self-centered, but the text moves along so quickly that all of the kneejerk emotional responses seem, in turn, fitting. I normally roll my eyes at crimes of passion (being passionless m’self), but Brewer’s prose just puts the pedal on all of it; I _felt_ the energy through the writing, and so could easily get caught up in the forward momentum of it all, which very truthfully carries forth from near as soon as the crime is planned to the final insanities when it’s (spoiler?) all falling wildly apart.