Rocks Beat Paper
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this “highly entertaining” heist thriller, there is no honor among jewel thieves (The Toronto Star).
A phone call brought Wilson and nine other men to a job in New York. At first, he couldn’t see a way to make the heist work, but the score—millions of dollars in diamonds—motivated him to try. Wilson came up with a plan he knew would work . . . until the inside man got killed and took the job with him.
With no way inside, the crew walks away without the diamonds. Now, on his own, Wilson is free to execute the job his way. He sets a con in motion that should run as predictably as a trail of dominoes—except the con doesn’t rely on inanimate tiles, it relies on people. And when Wilson pushes all the pieces across the board, he finds that there are other players making their own moves against him. No one is willing to walk away because the job is about more than money. The job is about diamonds. And in this game, rocks beat paper every time.
“Wilson is a captivating character: cold, merciless, magnetic, and honest about the world he willingly inhabits . . . Combining the intense grit of Richard Stark’s Parker series with the amorality of Jim Thompson’s work, Knowles once again delivers a heady brew of tough-guy dialogue, byzantine plots, [and] vibrant characters.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson, the antihero of this fantastic hardboiled criminal noir from Knowles (The Buffalo Job), is a straight shooter; that is, as a cohort tells him, "People seem to have a habit of getting shot around you, and you are usually the one holding the gun." Wilson, a career criminal, has survived five brutal novels thus far, each page laden with violence, schemes, double crosses, backstabbers, and more besides. This tense thriller draws him into that most classic of criminal capers: a diamond heist. After a key player is killed, the job is called off, but Wilson decides to do it anyway, on his own terms. Wilson is a captivating character: cold, merciless, magnetic, and honest about the world he willingly inhabits. "The games we play are never fair and they never end clean," he observes. "They just end." Combining the intense grit of Richard Stark's Parker series with the amorality of Jim Thompson's work, Knowles once again delivers a heady brew of tough-guy dialogue, byzantine plots, vibrant characters, and a protagonist who believes only in "an I for an I."
