Review: Character assassination
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 5, 2013
If you have already discovered Lawrence De Maria through his knock-out first thriller, "Sound of Blood," you'll be glad to find out what happens next to Jake Scarne in this omnibus collection. Jake, the tough ex-cop turned P.I., is still licking his wounds as "Madman's Thirst" starts, making ends meet on divorce and insurance cases. He quickly sheds the sulking veneer when he gets sucked into a case involving the stomach-crunching rape and murder of a teenage girl. This thriller is dark, gritty and too realistic.Then De Maria introduces Alton Rhode, supposedly the boy-wonder of P.I.s who can do everything from finding a French restaurant in Italian-saturated Staten Island to teasing out the long threads of sexual perversion, revenge and blackmail in a case that started long before he was hired. In "Laura Lee," nothing is quite as it seems at first.De Maria, a financial journalist for most of his career, takes the third character in this omnibus, Cole Sudden, through a $300 million Ponzi scheme that left craters in the lives of thousands of small investors. In "Hurricane Fats," De Maria conjures up -- or remembers -- a brutal mobster, lethal spy, laconic hit man and others who are torn asunder by one of Florida's most horrific storms and villainous scam artists.Read De Maria for his three-dimensional characters, or nearly photographic settings, or elaborately intricate crimes. If you read these thrillers as they were first published, as I did, you'll still want to have this omnibus edition so you can track the characters as they evolve in books to come. You'll, for sure, want to know what happens next to Jake Scarne, Alton Rhode and Cole Sudden.