Bag Men: A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The authenticity of George V. Higgins and the hipness of Carl Hiassen combine to galvanic effect in this debut police thriller of Boston in the sixties.
The authenticity of George V. Higgins and the hipness of Carl Hiassen combine to galvanic effect in this debut police thriller of Boston in the sixties. An urban police thriller and first novel with a differenceliterary smarts and the real inside skinny on big-city politics and crime fighting. New Year's Day, 1965. The body of Father George Sedgewick is discovered on a snow-covered runway of Logan Airport, brutally murdered. No leads. Missing: four thousand hosts, blessed by the Pope, meant to be given out to the faithful at the first English-language mass in America later that year. Assigned to the case: Ray Dunn, rising young assistant district attorney, son of a corrupt cop. In another part of the city, legendary narcotics detective Manny Manning begins a desperate search for the shadowy source of deadly new heroin hitting the streets. This time Manny is determined to reach the top, but his adversary is cunning, brutaland branching out into a strange new drug called "acid". . . These quests for a killer and a dealer will intersect, unleashing the ghosts of the past and unlocking the secrets of Boston's most powerful institutions. Authentic, knowing, bracingly cynical, Bag Men immediately launches John Flood into the first rank of America's crime writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spare writing and a roster of flawed, struggling characters highlight this terse, engrossing debut, which earns high marks for its original setting and plot. It's 1965 in Boston, just before the first English-language mass in America is to be celebrated by Cardinal Cushing. George Sedgewick, the priest who is delivering communion wafers personally blessed by the pope, is murdered at Logan Airport, and the hosts are stolen. In charge of the case is Ray Dunn, the ADA who fixes things for DA Johnny Cahill and cleans up after Johnny's playboy son, Eddie. Meanwhile, narcotics detective Manny Manning, searching for the supplier of a killer strain of heroin, hears about the imminent street presence of a new drug that's about to be declared illegal in the U.S., a drug called LSD. The two searches converge when the past of the dead priest points to electroshock therapy and secret experiments conducted at the naval base at Portsmouth. It's a bleak tale told with no frills--and no nobility either. In the world that Flood--a Boston federal prosecutor writing under a pseudonym--has created, no one is untainted: Ray Dunn is haunted by the arrest of his father in a police corruption scandal and is compromised by his clean-up activities for the DA; Manny Manning was an informant gathering evidence against his fellow cops for the feds; and even the Monsignor who knows Sedgewick lies. In Flood's 1965 Boston, there are no easy answers and no clear victors--except perhaps the pseudonymous Flood himself, a natural storyteller, who, with this accomplished first novel, has claimed his own piece of turf in the city of George Higgins and Robert Parker.
