Everybody Dies
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- € 3,99
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A blistering Matt Scudder novel.
Matt Scudder is well and truly off the booze, but he still spends time with some of his old drinking pals including Mick Ballou - an Irish American who operates more often than not on the wrong side of the law.
Mick is worried - a garage full of bourbon has been ripped off and two of his henchman killed in cold blood. Somebody is muscling in on Micks patch and he wants Scudder to look into it. Matt reluctantly agrees to take a look but won't promise a result. On the way home he is attacked by somebody wants him off Mick's case.
The following weekend Matt's mentor from AA is shot dead at point blank range when Scudder is in the men's room of the restaurant where the 2 had met for dinner - Matt knows it should have been him. Now the case is personal and no matter that he's warned off by his ex-colleagues in the NYPD and his wife Elaine, this is one he is going to see out to the end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The body count is indeed high in this latest Matt Scudder tale, which is also the best since A Walk Among the Tombstones (1993)--resonant, thoughtful, richly textured and capped by a slam-bang windup. At the center of the case is Matt's old buddy, Mick Ballou, the murderous and hard-drinking Irish mobster with a deeply philosophical streak who is one of Block's most enduring creations. Two of Mick's henchmen have been killed in what should have been a routine liquor hijacking. After Scudder helps Mick bury the bodies at the mobster's upstate farm, he finds he has been targeted himself. Two hoods try to rough him up on the street, then an old friend, Matt's sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous, is gunned down in a restaurant after being mistaken for Matt. It soon becomes clear that someone from Ballou's past is aiming to destroy him, and Matt, caught in the crossfire, has to try to determine who's behind the mayhem. He does so in his usual ruminative way, working it out with wife Elaine, streetwise sidekick TJ and old cop comrades who are now, because of his friendship with Ballou, against him. In the end, Matt has to stand alone with Ballou to put a stop to the vendetta in a blaze of gunfire. Block's seamless weave of thought and action, and his matchless gift for dialogue that is true, funny and revealing, have seldom been on more effective display. The pages leading up to the climax have an almost Shakespearean feel for human resignation in the face of mortality.
