Steal the Show
A Willis Gidney Mystery
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
George Pelecanos calls Thomas Kaufman "a welcome new voice in Washington, D.C., crime fiction."
Willis Gidney needs money because he's found a girl.
No, no, not that kind of girl. This is an abandoned baby girl. Gidney found her on a case. So he hands the girl to the cops, right?
Wrong, because Gidney started life the same way---abandoned. He knows all about D.C.'s juvenile-justice system, having barely survived it himself. That makes it hard to give up the girl. Too bad that unmarried private eyes aren't usually thought of as ideal parents. So now Gidney needs a lawyer, and that means money.
Enter Rush Gemelli, a code-writing hacker who pays Gidney to commit a felony. Just a small one. Nothing serious, really, but you know how these things can snowball. Gidney thinks this is a onetime venture, but Gemelli has other ideas. He blackmails Gidney into joining up with his father, Chuck, the head of the motion picture lobby in D.C. And when Chuck's former partner is murdered, it looks like someone may be playing Gidney.
Add to that the unwanted attentions of a crazed actress, the D.C. case worker from hell, and the Vietnamese and Salvadoran gangs out to kill him, and it's all Gidney can do to keep from getting his movie ticket punched--permanently.
A unique hero, a quirky cast, and a riveting mystery make Steal the Show a winner.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hard-boiled PI fans will find a lot to savor in Kaufman's sequel to 2010's Drink the Tea. When Rush Gemelli whose father, a former White House senior adviser, heads the Motion Picture Alliance Council asks Washington, D.C., PI Willis Gidney to break into an Alexandria, Va., warehouse, a suspected movie piracy site, Gidney at first refuses. Later, business being slow, he accepts the well-paid job. At the warehouse, the detective finds disk burners running off copies of DVDs and two Asian gunmen. Gidney escapes, but he gets a bad feeling about his employer's reliability. Meanwhile, his personal life takes a turn for the worse after he learns that approval for his adopting the two-year-old girl he rescued from a fire rests in the hands of a nasty caseworker. The flawed but humane lead and the rock-solid writing more than compensate for some less than credible plot twists.
