Losers Live Longer
Atwood brings back droopy detective Payton Sherwood, familiar from 1999'sEast of A, in this modernized crime tale. Sherwood is the titular loser: Two-thirds of the year gone by and I'd only had four paying clients. Then retired PI George Rowell phones with a job. When Rowell is run down and killed in the street in front of Sherwood's office, Sherwood rifles the old man's pockets, comes up with several unrelated bits of paper and takes off before the cops come. Despite the death of his client, Sherwood begins to unravel a rat's nest of mysteries, with bad guys beating the snot out of him several times along the way. References to Craigslist and eBay jar slightly with the otherwise straightforwardly old-fashioned tale of a PI who cares moreabout honor and truth than money.(Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.