20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A SKILLFUL DEBUT, January 9, 2001
This review is from: Easy Money (Paperback)
There's a new kind of heroine out there and she takes no prisoners. Her name is Allie Kerry and we meet her in Jenny Siler's remarkably proficient debut thriller Easy Money.
Allie is a courier. She learned her trade in Florida at her widowed father's knee: "In the Keys smuggling has always been a kind of family business, like farming in the Midwest. I knew several boys my age who helped their fathers or uncles on runs. None of my friends had paper routes or summer jobs busing tables. We learned early where the real money was to be made."
The 27-year-old Allie, a former cocaine addict has learned many lessons well - she knows where to get false I.D.s, how to change her appearance with hair dye and contact lenses, how to floor her Mustang and pack a Walther in the back of her jeans after fastening a small holster around her ankle and sliding a Beretta inside.
But she needs more than underworld savvy to save herself when she becomes the object of a nationwide manhunt, after being set up for murders she did not commit.
With her cadre of scurrilous friends and a tongue at the ready with four-letter epithets, Allie is not an especially endearing heroine. It is to the author's credit that we do care about Allie and pull for her to get out of a seemingly inextricable situation.
Not at all particular about what she picks up or delivers, Allie has agreed to do a pick-up at a seedy bar in the outskirts of Seattle. That should have been easy, earning her easy money. Instead, the computer disc that is slipped into her pocket results in the death of her contact sending warning signals to Allie's brain and shivers up her spine.
When she seeks brief refuge with an old friend and computer expert, he, too, is slain. Allie has apparently stumbled onto evidence concerning a 30-year-old CIA cover-up in Vietnam. She is soon running for her life, having no one to trust and, actually, nowhere to go.
Suspense mounts as she races through the shadowy side of American life and doesn't let up until the final startling page.
With experience as a forklift driver, a furniture-mover, a grape-picker and a bartender among other occupations, one cannot help but wonder where Jenny Siler learned to write, but no matter. Write she does! Her pictures of Vietnam War experiences elicit horrified shudders while her sometimes touching reminiscences about a father-daughter relationship resonate.
With the skill of an experienced master of the thriller genre, Ms. Siler constructs a commendable plot with enough ups and downs to make Easy Money a mesmerizing page-turner. She is equally deft at drawing scenes of the natural world, whether it be a muggy evening on Key West or the vast emptiness of Montana: "You begin to wonder if the retreat of the great inland sea really left mussel shells in the country so named. You can imagine fields of kelp where the wind now stirs wheat. Low clouds glide above you like pods of prehistoric whales."
Jenny Siler is an author to watch - watch and eagerly wait for what will come next.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Easy reading, hard to put down, travel fast and seedy!!!, May 7, 1999
Having traveled in the many places Ali goes made this one of the best adventures reading I've had in years. Ms. Siler brings you right inside of the trip. This is a good sit down and let the mind build your place in the story, you'll feel like your sitting in that blue Mustang looking back over your shoulder, riding shotgun for Ali. This is not the place to give up the details, enjoy a good adventure, you might even need that Rand-McNally to find your way around.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Do We Really Care About This Heroine?, March 18, 1999
Alison Kerry is our protagonist, and she makes her living as a courier hauling drugs and other contraband from one crook to the next. Her father is also in the drug business, as is his best buddy, and his girl friend.....etc. An honest guy sneaks into the book, but the author does him in quickly so that he doesn't make the other characters look too tawdry.
So, what's our Key West, trailer trash heroine (with the attractive feminine nickname of "Al") up to? She's moving a computer disc with some Vietnam secrets from one bad guy to the next, and she runs into trouble. There are three ho hum action scenes in the book separated by great gobs of filler.
I didn't care about any of the following elements of the book: the heroine; her friends; her family; the tedious, hackneyed Viet Nam atrocity plot; the soporific action scenes; or the writing. This, indeed, is one of those books that once you put it down, you will have trouble picking it up again.
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