With only seventy-two hours to find out who attacked his partner, Ballard races through Oakland and San Francisco to track down a stripper, an embezzler, and an ex-con. Reprint. NYT.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Repo Mystery Sizzles In '70s San Fran,
By
This review is from: Dead Skip (The Dka File Novels)
A repo man turns up unconscious and near death in a Jaguar he just reclaimed from its unrightful owner. The police smell whisky and think he was joyriding, but at least one colleague at Daniel Kearny Associates (DKA) isn't buying and sets out to figure out what really happened, with a 72-hour time limit imposed by his apparently-unsympathetic boss.
This is the first book in Joe Gores' DKA series, and the second I've read after "32 Cadillacs," which others rave about being the cream of the series but which left me a bit flat. This one, however, is really good, and I found myself warming to it despite a slow start and my low expectations. The feeling of the book is dog-eared and desperate. After a few pages of setting the scene, an already-tired Larry Ballard sets about trying to unravel the mystery of who clocked his partner by checking up every one of the last few cases on his partner's file. This is when the story begins to take off, not so much in terms of plot (it takes a while for Ballard to narrow down the list, and longer still to figure out why the final suspect might have done it) but in terms of giving the reader a sense of what the life of a repo man is all about. Ballard meets up with all kinds of people, lawabiding and otherwise, like the 30-something woman who left her husband to shack up with a teenaged boy, the movers who loll around their office drunk as skunks on a weekday morning, and the rock musician who plays at a club called "Freaks." It's set in San Francisco in the early 70s (Gores wrote the book in 1972) and you get a real sense of what the city was turning into in the decade and a half since "Vertigo." I didn't mind the long time it took for Ballard to get to the bottom of things. I was enjoying the ride. Gores gives you just enough story with each person to give you a sense of life's richness and cruelties, then moves on to the next one as Ballard keeps on the clock. Gores is not only sharp and deft at building a multi-faceted plot, he is really funny. "Why do those middle-aged swingers, when they start swinging, always buy a T-Bird?" one guy asks Ballard. Another woman old enough to be his grandmother loses her matronly reserve when asked about a bail skipper: "She made a two-word comment about Griffin and his mother that was probably more ritual than fact..." I was still laughing at that one a dozen pages later. Gores's dialogue, pacing, and rich sense of character really put him in league with other great modern-day mystery writers like Elmore Leonard and Ed McBain who typically give you a lot more to chew over than a dead body. "Dead Skip" would be worthwhile reading even if it didn't lead to a series of other books. The best part is there's more of them still ahead for me.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent,
By A Customer
This review is from: Dead Skip (The Dka File Novels)
This book was really hard to put. It's a shame that is no longer available. The writing is fast, excellent and intelligent. I really loved this book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Dead Skip (The Dka File Novels)
Barton Heslip has had a good day, repossessing three cars for his employer, DKA. Back at the office, he calls his friend and co-worker Larry Ballard, then steps outside to collect some paperwork from his car. Someone emerges from the shadows and hits him with a sap. Now Heslip is in a coma, having been pulled from a car that went over a cliff, and Dan Kearny, founder of DKA, has given Ballard 72 hours to find the man who tried to kill Heslip. As time begins to run out, Kearny joins the hunt.
Dead Skip is a fast-paced, carefully plotted detective story. Joe Gores has a sharp eye for the people who walk San Francisco's streets and a finely tuned ear for dialog. He writes with an economical style, providing just enough detail to give personality to his characters and authenticity to his settings. The mystery of Heslip's assailant isn't easy to guess but the resolution is credible. The process of detection, as practiced by Ballard and then by Kearny, is fascinating. Each comes to the same conclusion by independent means, a plot device that makes the story even more interesting. It's a shame Dead Skip isn't still in print. It deserves the status of a genre classic.
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