The Poor Boy's Game
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
When US Marshal Frannie Mullen gets one of her best friends shot during a routine apprehension, her career is over. Still reeling from the loss, Frannie is trying to sort out her feelings for Wyatt, the reformed outlaw who loves her, and to support her newly-sober sister, Mae, as she struggles with the fallout of their unstable, violent childhood.
Their father Patrick Mullen is a thug, a vicious enforcer for a corrupt Philadelphia union, and when he escapes from prison, bodies of ex-rivals and witnesses begin piling up. Now Frannie is suspected as an accomplice in his escape and targeted by shadowy killers from the Philadelphia underworld. Unsure who to trust, drawing on the skills she's learned as a Marshal and her training as a boxer, Frannie is forced to fight to protect her shattered sister and Patrick's pregnant girlfriend from the most dangerous criminal she's ever faced—her own father.
The Poor Boy's Game is the most propulsive, riveting novel yet from crime fiction master Dennis Tafoya.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tafoya (The Wolves of Fairmount Park) delivers a gut-wrenching crime thriller as gritty and harsh as a Philadelphia winter. Soon after U.S. Marshal Frannie Mullen resigns from the force because one of her men is killed during what should have been a routine takedown in downtown Philly, she learns that her father, Patrick Mullen, a brutal enforcer for corrupt union boss Adolph Wurtz, has escaped from a Louisiana federal prison and may be coming to hurt her and her sister, Mae. As young girls, both were traumatized after seeing their father beat their mother to death and burn their house down. Now the vengeful Patrick is on the loose, hunted by the FBI, the marshals, and remnants of the union gang. Frannie and fragile Mae are in the middle suspects in the eyes of some FBI agents, bait in the eyes of Wurtz's men. The equation seems simple, but Tafoya does a superb job keeping the reader guessing to the surprise end.