Body Scissors: A Novel (Dan Reles Mysteries) [Hardcover]

Michael Simon (Author)

Book Description

Series: Dan Reles Mysteries | Publication Date: August 18, 2005

Set in the oil bust days of late 1980s Texas, Michael Simon’s explosive debut, Dirty Sally, introduced readers to Detective Dan Reles, Austin Homicide’s only New Yorker and its only Jew. In Body Scissors, a brand-new decade brings a new criminal web of intrigue and violence for Dan to untangle.

It’s January 1991, and as America watches the bombs drop on Iraq at the start of Desert Storm, a botched assassination attempt on Virginia Key, a rising black community leader, captures the attention of the local press. With one of Key’s children in a coma and the other dead, Dan is eager to investigate. That is, until department politics bump him off the case.

Meanwhile, several affluent white college kids fall comatose and doctors are frantic to find an explanation. As a bizarre chain of events puts Dan on the trail of a psychotic drug dealer with a broad network of influence and a hit list (featuring Dan’s name prominently), Dan is certain he can catch the dealer and break the case wide open—unless the dealer gets to Dan first. A violent and thrilling adventure ride, Body Scissors confirms Michael Simon as the next big talent in hard-boiled crime fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Simon's worthy sequel to his debut thriller, Dirty Sally (2004), Dan Reles, the only Jewish detective on the Austin, Tex., police force, is on the trail of the would-be assailant of Virginia Key, a black community activist. The assassin succeeded in killing Key's young daughter and critically injuring her even younger son. Soon after Reles starts working on the case, however, he's replaced by the force's only African-American detective, his friend James Torbett, after the department heads decide this would be more appropriate. Reles, meanwhile, is directed to find out what's causing a number of young college students from wealthy families to slip into comas. It isn't long before he sees a connection between the two cases—and that the drug kingpin behind both also has him on a hit list. While Reles is not yet as complete a character as he could be, the well-depicted setting, the fast (if not breakneck) pace, evocative atmosphere and believable dialogue hold the reader's attention throughout.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

It's early 1991 in Austin, Texas, and the first Gulf War is beginning. Homicide detective and tough Jew Dan Reles (Dirty Sally, 2004) is living with his dead partner's gorgeous widow, Rachel Velez, who is wondering if she can survive another cop. When a black activist's children are shot in a botched assassination attempt, Reles is partnered with James Torbett--a righteous, angry black man and the APD's other odd man out--to follow clues that wind through shooting galleries, offshore banks, and the local air force base. At the end of the trail lie both a terrifying drug kingpin and facts Reles swore to Velez he'd leave hidden--the truth about her husband's death. Simon has been compared to James Ellroy, but while Ellroy's outrage at the bad white men in blue is more alleged than evident, Simon's sympathies are clearly with the folks on the receiving end of the nightstick. As Simon continues to document Austin's dark years, he indicts misery's profiteers--dealers, developers, and politicians--with an infectious indignation. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First edition. edition (August 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670034436
• ISBN-13: 978-0670034437
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,277,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cuts Deep, December 3, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Body Scissors: A Novel (Dan Reles Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Friends in Austin have advised me to get on the Michael Simon bandwagon, that he is the future of hardboiled cop thrillers. They point to the eccentric DIRTY SALLY, Simon's previous novel, as proof. In that outstamnding debut, which he Amazon readers voted as one of the best detective novels of 2004, we first got introduced to Dan Reles, a fish out of water if ever there was one, first off he's from upstate, and secondly he's Jewish, which apparently is a fantastically big deal in a town like Austin.

So I went ahead and bought a copy of BODY SCISSORS. In this book Dan is still thriving at the APD, except that he's under a lot of pressure from within because he's keeping a dark secret from Rachel Velez, the true story behind her husband's death. The husband, once Dan's partner, died with his skeletons locked up securely with extra large skeleton keys. You'll gasp when the book opens up, an armed attacker bursts into the rooms of a nice single mother and kills her baby in front of her. Whites fear Virginia Key, and blacks hate her, Simon tells us, and she's a fascinating character, sort of like Pam Grier but a bit younger. It would be a good part for Alicia Keys if she ever wanted to take a flier in the movies. She's an anti drug activist in a bad part of Austin, and when she comes to she finds out that her daughter is dead and her brave, unfortunate son is in the Pediatric Unit at the hospital . . . in a coma. Who did this, wonders Dan, while his associate, the black detective James, movs in attracted to Virginia's bewitching combination of hauteur, vulnerability, and sexual power.

Meanwhile, young wealthy white students are dying from a rohypnol like drug that just knocks them out, into the arms of death. Naturally, when they're white it grabs the attention of the news media. Some people would say, If recreational drugs kill the people who take them, that's a punishment that fits the crime, but Michael Simon sees it differently. In the Austin of the early 1990s, when this book is set for some reason, drugs were very much a part of the scene, and life couldn't have continued on any large economic sense, with them.

Kudos to author Simon for creating a dismal world of danger, drugs, dementia and daring--the five D's of a good thriller. It will remind mystery lovers with long memories of the Roger Simon books that Richard Dreyfuss starred in the movie version of. Same name, Simon, and same sort of fish out of water vision of the world. Also, Carly Simon with her perpetual outsider pout. But you know what they say, he who is the outsider sees more of the big picture. BODY SCISSORS cuts deep.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novel equally as dark and gritty as its prequel, DIRTY SALLY, September 22, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Scissors: A Novel (Dan Reles Mysteries) (Hardcover)

In 2004 Michael Simon immediately caught the attention of fans of noir fiction with DIRTY SALLY, his dark, gritty debut novel. Set in Austin, Texas in 1988, it introduced Homicide Detective Dan Reles, the only Yankee or Jew on the force, a complex and brooding man trying to stay upright in a crooked world. In BODY SCISSORS, Simon continues to build on the topics and themes introduced in DIRTY SALLY while further developing Reles's life and personality, using the dirty underside of Austin as an angry backdrop.

BODY SCISSORS is set in 1991 at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War. Reles is living with Rachel Velez, the widow of Joey Velez, his best friend and homicide partner. The opening passages, wherein Reles and Rachel seem constantly on the verge of connection, foreshadow the events of the book on a number of levels. Reles is assigned to assist in the investigation of an apparent assassination attempt on Virginia Key, an activist community leader. The attempt on Key's life is a failure but results in the death of her daughter while leaving her son in a coma.

From the moment of her introduction Key is an enigma who captures the attention --- and appreciation --- of Detective James Torbett. While Torbett struggles with his attraction to Key, Reles attempts to unravel the surprising connection between the attack upon Key and the seedy Austin drug scene. Key's personal and professional past have the potential to explode at any moment, but she is not the only one with a past; everyone, including Reles and Rachel, has secrets. As Reles's investigation uncovers a surprising revelation about Joey's past, Reles and Rachel join Key in becoming the targets of a powerful madman who seeks to enact a penultimate revenge upon each and every one of them.

Reles's Austin is not the Chamber of Commerce dream that hosts an annual music festival and free weekly events in front of city hall, and in general is a cultural and financial boomtown. Rather, it is a city cast in shadow, where actions at the highest and lowest levels are carried out in a furtive manner with dangerous ends, where one who expects betrayal, pain and death is never disappointed.

BODY SCISSORS is a story populated by evil characters on both sides of the law, in which the sins of the past fulfill their promise of dire consequences in the present. And Michael Simon? He writes like an angel sitting in a blackened room full of spiders. Highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great sequel to a dazzling debut novel, September 20, 2007

By 

Jonathan Geffner "ventriloquist" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Body Scissors (Dan Reles Mysteries) (Paperback)

Michael Simon proves that Dirty Sally was no fluke. This masterful second novel in the Dan Reles detective series is just as riveting, gripping and engrossing as its predecessor. Corruption at the highest levels of government and business in Austin, Texas are at the core of this intricate confluence of storylines involving outsider police detective Dan Reles. A believable cast of colorful, funny, grotesque and sad characters inhabit this noirish world, brought vividly to life in this exciting page-turner.