Flesh Wounds
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4.6 • 29 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A serial killer stalks post-WWII London in a gritty detective novel featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Troy.
An old flame has returned to Troy's life: Kitty Stilton, wife of an American presidential hopeful. Private eye Joey Rork has been hired to make sure Kitty's amorous liaisons with a rat pack crooner don't ruin her husband's political career. But he also wants to know why Kitty has been spotted with Danny Ryan, whose twin brothers, in addition to owning one of London's hottest jazz clubs, are said to have inherited the crime empire of a fallen mobster.
Before Rork can find out, he meets a gruesome end. And he isn't the only one: bodies have started turning up around London, dismembered in the same bizarre and horrifying way. Is it possible that the blood trail leads back to Troy's own police force and into Troy's own forgotten past? Flesh Wounds, a compulsively readable thriller, finds one of our most able storytellers at the height of his game.
"There are characters based on (or at least inspired by) everyone from Frank Sinatra to Meyer Lansky, enough dismembered bodies to satisfy the most morbid imaginations and frequent flashes of sly wit and social conscience that illuminate a vanished world." —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Lawton's marvelously evocative series of mysteries about Det. Sgt. Freddie Troy, Anglo-Russian Londoner, have been written and/or published in such a confusing order that it's hard to determine where this one, originally published in the U.K. in 2004 as Blue Rondo comes in the canon. Characters introduced in 2004's Bluffing Mr. Churchill, including Winston's distant cousin Bob Churchill, an ace gunsmith, play an important role here, as 29-year-old Troy, who's recovering from serious gunshot wounds, celebrates Christmas 1944 by taking shooting lessons from Bob. Troy's Russian aristocrat father turned British newspaper publisher has died; his mother's health is failing; his twin sisters seem to be intent on spreading their sexual favors around like caviar while their husbands are at the front. Then we jump ahead to the late 1950s, when London is becoming a mecca for American gamblers. Troy's old lover, the delightful ex-cop Kitty Stilton, returns to London as the wife of an important American politician with JFK overtones. There are characters based on (or at least inspired by) everyone from Frank Sinatra to Meyer Lansky, enough dismembered bodies to satisfy the most morbid imaginations and frequent flashes of sly wit and social conscience that illuminate a vanished world. Lawton's Troy series cries out to be made available with some kind of time line in order to give it, like Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy or the Jean-Louis St.-Cyr/Hermann Kohler books by J. Robert Janes, the genre classic status it deserves.
