Throwing 7's
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed novelist and columnist Denis Hamill knows the streets that glisten at night and the ones that soak up the dark; he knows the boroughs, the bingo halls, the harbors, and the hangouts. Now, Hamill brings his urban savvy to this new Bobby Emmet mystery set inside a winner-take-all crapshoot, New York City-style....
Empire Island is not the home of liberty. It's no place for a prison. And no immigrants ever passed through its portals. Instead, the abandoned Coast Guard station on the windswept waters of New York harbor is ground zero for an idea whose time has come: casino gambling in the Big Apple.
For Bobby, the fight over Empire Island gets personal when a young husband and wife mysteriously vanish from their downtown, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment. The police's main suspect -- landlord Jimmy Chung -- then disappears without a whimper, and Chung's attorney Izzy Gleason turns to Bobby for help.
That's when Bobby starts doing what he does best -- turning over stones in a town full of millionaires and madmen, call girls and choirboys. What he finds astounds even him. The whole city is gambling crazy. From underground crap games to mob-backed bookies to the quaint business of church and synagogue Las Vegas nights, millions of dollars are changing hands illegally every day. And the big guys want in.
Suddenly Bobby is playing with the heaviest hitters in New York, including the mayor, the state assembly speaker, and two dueling business tycoons: one who's into floating casinos, one who's into real estate, and both who are into a famous female tennis celebrity. As Bobby tries to figure out who is backstabbing who and why, he comes upon the beautiful, vengeance-crazed sister of one of the victims -- and the heart of the case, one that is inexplicably connected with New York City's last honest men: a rabbi, a minister, and a priest. No joke.
Edgy, gritty, darkly comic, THROWING 7's is a street-smart novel of corruption, vendettas, and the unlikely bedfellows that ambition and money breed. A single father, a loyal brother, and a man with contacts on every level of the city, Bobby Emmet is playing the one game in town that isn't fixed: where the prize is the truth, and you gamble with your life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although Hamill's second Bobby Emmet novel (after Three Quarters) is not without a measure of charm, its brutality at times can be hard to take. Bobby's improbably noxious lawyer, Izzy Gleason, looks to be the fall guy for the murder of a married couple. Eddie and Sally McCoy had the misfortune to resist moving out of their rent-controlled apartment in a building that is the proposed site for the terminal to a New York City offshore gambling casino--and Izzy is the attorney for the building's owner. Ex-cop Bobby, now a P.I., owes Izzy a favor and must strive to clear him. As he does, three religious leaders operate a lucrative gambling operation for purely humanitarian purposes, and gorgeous women--including Bobby's wildly wealthy ex-wife, a tennis star and a confused nun--throw themselves at him. Hamill (who pens the "Show People" column in the New York Daily News) sometimes allows noir posturing to trump good sense: If a woman is awakened by a killer at 3:57 a.m., would she really be wearing mascara that could smear and make her eyes "look like little muddy graves"? Would a man with a gun shoved into his mouth really contemplate how "only a killer wears gloves in July"? Still, Hamill has a knack for unflinching scenes of extreme brutality, and he makes an effort to humanize his hero, dwelling on Bobby's weekend, divorced-dad relationship with his daughter. Some readers may feel that the novel's excesses are morally redeemed by Bobby's trenchant good-guy posture; others may find the hero too one-dimensional to be convincing.
