The Poker Club
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Gorman’s writing is strong, fast and sleek as a bullet. He’s one of the best.”—Dean Koontz
It all started so innocently. It was just a group of buddies meeting for a weekly poker game. No harm done—until the night an intruder broke in while they were playing. They didn't mean to kill him, that was an accident. They thought if they threw the body in the river no one would ever know. That's where they were wrong. Dead wrong.
The intruder hadn't come alone. His friend was waiting for him outside the house and he saw it all. Suddenly the game had changed. What had started out as a simple poker game now became a game of cat and mouse. The stakes were raised too—to life and death. And it looked like the attacker in the shadows held all the cards.
"Scary because it's so plausible, and because Gorman knows exactly how to keep the reader on the edge of his seat."—Science Fiction Chronicle
“One of Gorman’s strongest yet . . . a sense of menace that grows until it becomes almost palpable.”—Forthcoming Mysteries
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Not all short story ideas can be stretched comfortably to fit the frame of a novel, as this tenuous expansion of Gorman's short suspense powerhouse "Out There in the Darkness" proves. The basic plot of the tale (first published as a chapbook in 1996) remains the same: four respectable suburban men learn deadly lessons in personal honesty and civic responsibility when they try covering up their accidental killing of a burglar and outwitting his vengeful accomplice. Gorman (The Day the Music Died) uses the extra elbow room to develop distinct personalities for his protagonists and evoke paranoid fears as their hitherto secure world of middle-class values grows increasingly precarious. Better still, he fleshes out the anonymous and implacable accomplice who stalks them, describing this figure as a suburban nightmare incarnate of "evil, modern evil, urban evil, of eyes that watched in the darkness, watched little children and good mothers, of eyes that coveted money and flesh and life itself." But the novel's first-person narrative limits options for sustaining the pace and pitch of the thrills. Aaron Tyler, the lawyer in whose house the killing occurred, gives muted second-hand accounts of how the experience unhinges the lives of his three friends. His own ordeal of menacing car chases, 4 a.m. phone calls and threats to his family quickly becomes repetitive and predictable. Gorman's lean, resilient prose is tough enough to hold the novel's weak patches and contrived finale together, but it can't disguise the overall thinness.
