Edge City
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Edge City, from the author of Low Bite, takes place in an every-noir-city (a thinly veiled portrait of San Francisco’s North Beach), and its newest resident is Reno, an angry fledgling just hatched out of prison. Getting out is like a weird dream, and the streets of the City are a muddle of sensations pooling around her.
First there’s the bustle—everybody busy with mysterious businesses—an amplifying racket of choices. Staggering out onto the late night streets of the City, Reno ends up at the infamous Istanbul Club: dim lights, Arabic music and the sensual Su’ad dancing. Music, booze, babes and drugs: what more could a felonious girl want?
She encounters Huntington, the poisonous charmer who lives above the Club—perverse and powerful in the way only the wealthy can be. Eddie, the underage bartender, is happy to chemically enhance every waking moment. Slowmotion, the sound light technician, huge and darkly mysterious, has connections to people and places that Reno didn’t even know existed. Slowmotion’s elegant friend, Poppy, offers mental transport to realms beyond Xanadu; in her little valise there’s everything necessary for any trip, including the hallucinogenic “Teeth of Idi Amin.”
The owner of the club, handsome gambler Sinclair, hires Reno to waitress. Grumbling, drinking, snarling, and swearing, Reno bangs her way through everyone else’s complicated plans, entangling herself in a byzantine labyrinth of betrayal, revenge, general mayhem, and yes, good times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Just out of prison, Soracco's light-fingered heroine, Reno, slips into the Club Istanbul (in an unspecified American city) for a few drinks. As she watches her meager stash vanish in alcohol, she recognizes an old friend, Susanna--professional name Su'ad the Fortunate--belly dancing on stage. Soon Reno is waitressing amidst the surface sleaze of B-girls and watered-down booze, her eye on the best chance to score some money. Upstairs lives the up-to-no-good Mr. Huntington; downstairs the new manager Sinclair observes the assembled lost souls eager to stuff crumpled greenbacks down the front of Su'ad's sequined bra. An atmosphere thick with the suggestion of villainy clears as blackmail and murder emerge, deeds committed by any one (or more) of an extensive cast of losers, including Reno, who seems destined never to get a break. Soracco ( Low Bite ) keeps her eye on minutiae; thus readers learn more than they may need to know about how to light a stage full of moving flesh. Meandering through pools of booze and moments of tawdry sex and petty larceny, Soracco's dense, bravura narrative is nevertheless a triumph of (hard-boiled) style over substance.