Amazon.com Review
Award-winning journalist Howard Swindle is best known for his expeditions into the world of true crime.
Trespasses: Portrait of a Serial Rapist and
Deliberate Indifference are two gutsy and disturbing real-life thrillers that virtually sweat with emotion and drama.
Jitter Joint is Swindle's first stab at fiction--although in reality he hasn't left the real world too far behind. His central character, Jeb Quinlin, is an alcoholic--as Swindle was some years back. The struggle for sobriety and starting afresh, is a subject that Swindle knows only too well, and he therefore creates a remarkably convincing protagonist. Quinlin, a homicide detective for the Dallas P.D., is forced into a rehabilitation clinic by his boss and his wife. Losing his "estranged wife from the far side of hell" is not a major concern, but losing his beloved job would be agonizing. So Quinlin checks himself in, and prepares to dry out. Yet, before he can even say "Jack Daniels," a grisly murder occurs at the clinic, quickly followed by another. What makes these murders sinister is that the murderer leaves behind a card on each body--a card adorned with a step from AA's Twelve Step program. Quinlin's law-enforcement profession (and more pressure from his boss) make him the perfect person to solve these hideous crimes--despite his fragile state of mind. So begins a frantic battle against time, as Quinlin attempts to unveil the murderer, wrestle with the bottle, and struggle with a new romance. Jitter Joint is a highly addictive read that leaves us yearning for more from Howard Swindle. --Naomi Gesinger
From Publishers Weekly
Delirium tremens turns to trembling fear in this fast, tense fiction debut by Swindle, a three-time Pulitzer Prize- winner for newspaper editing. Under pressure from his boss, Captain Bill Barrick, and from his disaffected wife, hard-drinking homicide detective Jeb Quinlin finds himself off his Dallas beat and reluctantly drying out in a fancy AA clinic. Jeb's road to recovery is diverted, though, when the members of his therapy group (run by the loathsome Dr. Wellman Bergoff), one by one, turn up literally dead drunk. The AA slogans scrawled across the victims' corpses?"Our lives had become unmanageable" or "God grant me the serenity"?cause Jed to suspect an inside job. The violence escalates when Barrick puts him on the case, a move that threatens to push the detective off the wagon. Swindle (Trespasses: Portrait of a Serial Rapist) sweats his hero past multiple threats in a plot steeped in AA ambiance?perhaps too deeply for some readers' taste?without losing a suspenseful edge. Car chases and fight scenes are film-clip clear while goofy characters gel in a credible story with an ending that points, happily, to a possible series. Agent, Janet Wilkins Manus.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
