num_pages: 293
description: Reese Waters is barely a day out of Fishkill Penitentiary before his world is spinning crazily out of his control, in this shrewd new crime novel from Charlie Stella.An unlikely hero—formerly a New York city bus driver and now an ex-con—Reese wants only to do the right thing by his prison buddy Peter Rizzo. He just doesn’t expect the right thing to entail $50,000 in cash, a funeral, a couple of hitmen, and the mean-spirited schemes of Rizzo’s congenitally greedy ex-wife.Headstrong, principled, edgy, and a bit naïve, Reese stumbles into the hard-boiled heart of Stella’s fast-paced, fast-talking, continually unpredictable plot. Yet even when Reese finds himself facing down Mafia consigliere Jimmy “Wigs” Valentine (he’s got a lot more wigs than scruples) or parleying with a Nation of Islam splinter group or stymieing the homicide investigation of two NYPD detectives, Reese doesn’t falter. Because he made Pete a promise.It’s a promise that more than several ruthless, grasping, and increasingly dangerous cheapskates don’t want Reese to keep. For they’re all after the money, which is all at the same time a divorce settlement, an unhonored debt, a dead man’s ransom, a shakedown, a killer’s fee, and a mere fifty Gs. What they will do for it, in Stella’s dynamite climax, gets as wild as the ride of a renegade bus running loose through a nighttime shoot-out in the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan.
language: English
title: Cheapskates
titlecomplete: Cheapskates
genres: Crime
ratings_count: 74
publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub