Every Man a Menace
A Novel
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3.8 • 12 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The author of The White Van delivers "everything you could want in a thriller—lightning pace, dead-on dialogue, and a twisting, high-torque plot" (Award-winning author Carl Hiaasen).
Patrick Hoffman burst onto the crime fiction scene with The White Van, a bank heist thriller set on the back streets of San Francisco and a finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. Now he returns with his second novel, Every Man a Menace, the inside story of a ruthless ecstasy-smuggling ring.
San Francisco is about to receive the biggest delivery of MDMA to hit the West Coast in years. Raymond Gaspar, just out of prison, is sent to the city to check in on the increasingly erratic dealer expected to take care of distribution. In Miami, the man responsible for getting the drugs across the Pacific has just met the girl of his dreams—a woman who can't seem to keep her story straight. And thousands of miles away in Bangkok, someone farther up the supply chain is about to make a phone call that will put all their lives at risk.
Stretching from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia to the Golden Gate of San Francisco, Every Man a Menace offers "a mind-bending, attention-demanding narrative as full of shocks and surprises as an LSD party" (The Wall Street Journal).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hoffman follows his well-received debut, 2014's The White Van, with an unrelentingly grim noir set in San Francisco that explores the violent underside of the drug trade from a variety of overlapping perspectives. The first section, which is the best, introduces small-time criminal Raymond Gaspar, who's about to complete a four-year prison term that was the upshot of his arrest for possession of crystal meth and trying to sell a stolen boat. After Raymond's release, Arthur, a power broker who "could make a call to the Black Guerilla Family or the Aryan Brotherhood and get action from either group," turns to him for help. Arthur still has his hand in selling Ecstasy, but he's not comfortable with the middlemen he's been working with. He asks Raymond to get to know both Gloria Ocampo, who brings the narcotic into San Francisco, and her buyer, Shadrack Pullman, so that Raymond can protect Arthur's interests. Though the format and basic story line are nothing new, Hoffman, a private investigator, makes his version feel real.
