Another wild ride from Chase. Actually a bit more plausible than the other books of his that I have read--but not much. Mysterious stranger arrives in small town, fixes a fight, robs a bank, flees to Kansas City, joins a mob, and on it goes. Not a page without some sort of action or brutality. Nobody does this much better than Chase. Rating a book like this sort of calls into question my whole rating scheme--is this really better than Dostoevsky? I guess I rate books on how well they achieve what they set out to achieve, so perhaps Chase deserves more than 3 1/2 stars by that standard. ( )