Preston Lang

Pick up any of Lang's crime novels and you will find a bevy of lowlife
characters, each of them dumber than the next. In this novel, you
have a group of characters including particularly Cyril the college-boy
turned drug courier who doesn't carry a piece and falls for any damsel
that he meets in a bar, his brother, a drug enforcer, Willow, a curvy
lady who carries a gun, Danny, a sex offender who makes best friends
with the football-player guy who lives upstairs, Marcus, and together
they make the most unlikely pair of fortune hunters. There are others
in the book, but they are all in some sense losers with limited closed-in
worlds who can't seem to escape from their petty little lives.
There is a bit of humor in this novel as each of the characters seems to
be more bumbling than suave, particularly the lead character Cyril,
and the story starts a little slow, but once it gets going, it is just an
excellent tale that is hard to put down. Really enjoy Lang's writing
style which is matter-of-fact storytelling and just easy to read.
… (altro)

Preston Lang's books are rock solid crime fiction. But his narrative
voice is so subtle that at first you don't think there is much going on.
The Blind Rooster starts as a story about an itinerant drifter/conman/
penniless bum who ditches without paying at the diner, sneaks in the
movie theater, and knows the ins and outs of a thousand little tricks
about how to break in and how to pickpocket old ladies. He meets a
waitress in a diner who notes his conman ways and explains how
useful he could be in a little scheme to rob a neighbor of a rare set of
stamps. Its kind of a too-cute-to-be-real boy-meets-girl story, but
there's more going on than meets the eye. Throw in a Karaoke-singing older woman, a golf towel salesman, a want-to-be Japanese exchange
student, and a town that clearly doesn't have a clue what's going on.
Having just discovered Lang's work, I have enjoyed each of his books.
They are all different. They all have a subtle narrative voice that draws
you in without, for the most part, over-the-top action. Lang's books
are not filled with pulpy phrases. He doesn't try to parrot the old
masters of crime fiction. But, what he gives you in these books is just
really top-notch fiction. You find yourself rooting for a conman/burglar/
bum who has never held a real job and sponges off whoever he meets.… (altro)

It's a story about a convenience store clerk and his manager operating
a bodega in the Bronx, selling cartons of smokes under the table. But
somehow Lang makes it a rip-roaring hard-to-put-down noir tale about
despair and desperation and a band of crooks at each other's throats.
Take a Slovenian ex-con with no prospects, a tough-as-nails mean-
spirited take-no-crap woman with an itchy trigger finger, a glamorous
Irish-Cuban entrepreneur, a guy in a ski mask with a pistol, and and
an angry Eastern European Mafioso and you've got trouble with a
capital T.
This is a taste of modern noir that is just plain great. It's funny, tragic,
and tough not to finish. Really enjoyed it.
… (altro)