Customer Reviews

The Long Fall: A Novel of Crime

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Kostoff's novel grabs you from page one. His stunning use of language is a treat. More than this, he tells a compelling tale of losers, loss, and lost causes. Jimmy Coates is the archetypal schlemiel who just can't quite understand what's gone wrong in his life. Why else would he take a job as a doomed bad guy (killed six times daily) with the ludicrous Big and Bigger Jones Old Wild West Park? The comparison of other reviewers to Elmore Leonard is appropriate: this is a page turner with a payoff. Unfortunately, and despite the book's humor, for most of the characters the payoff is a downer. But the reader of Kostoff's second novel is richly rewarded indeed.

This is a sensational novel. It's hilarious and harrowing by turns and superbly written from top to bottom. Kostoff's style is reminiscent of Elmore Leonard at his best, and The Long Fall is dark and devilish and all but impossible to put down.

An absolute gem of a literary crime novel, "The Long Fall" is an expertly concocted cocktail of character development, tight plotting and musical language that explores deep themes of discontent and desire to change.

It somehow manages the trick of not wasting a single word while rising high above the Patterson writing waterline. It has all the tone and discipline of high literature but skips the flat affect-less affectations of the "serious" MFA-grad-style novels, balancing wit and generous color with a genuine, undistanced affection for its multi-dimensional dirtbags. (The scene in which main character Jimmy Coates, a minor-league criminal, wins a bar bet by listing at least fifty synonyms for breasts in a minute's time, is just one example.)

An absolute pleasure to read, and re-read. And re-read again.

A sample of Kostoff's sublime sucker-punch prose:

"Jimmy figures his teachers, Mom and Richard had been right all along. There must be something missing in him. He's never wanted things bad enough to work for them. He knows he's supposed to want them, but it never worked out that way. The idea of accumulating a bunch of things just never held any juice for him. That's why it was so easy to take them. Most people had more than they needed anyway, and they always wanted more, and Jimmy basically filled the gap between the attic and the yard sale."

If Elmore Leonard's name was on this book, not only would everyone recognize it as a Leonard book, but call it one of his best. Jimmy is a classic Leonard protagonist -- a criminal who is really just a f**k-up, but who is in trouble with some really serious bad guys. His crimes themselves are hilarious -- cactus smuggler, Beanie Baby thief. Kostoff is a tad more elegant as a writer than Leonard, but lacks Leonard's hardboiledness. I was rooting for a different ending, but the one provided is elegant, if a bit sad.

don't know why more people haven't heard of this one, but if you like crime fiction, especially noirish stuff with a literary bent, get thee to a bookstore, and I mean now. If I give you a one-liner on the story, it'll sound trite, so I won't. Instead, let me say that Kostoff is that rarest breed of stylist who can, in a minimum of space, evoke a whole world. He's earned comparisons to Elmore Leonard, and while they are in some ways apt, his work is all his own, and he brings a lyricism that Leonard generally eschews ("Jimmy remembering all the make-out sessions with Jean, both of them seventeen, the universe running under their skin, and every necessary truth found in tongues and fingers and the sweet ache of breath...").

A dark book with a heart but no promises of happiness, THE LONG FALL is, simply, terrific. Highly recommended.

The Long Fall was my Edgar winner choice on so many levels it was scary. Kostoff does some wonderful things with this story; brother vs. brother, brother and sister-in-law ... coveting both dry cleaning profits and the spouse ... it's a wonderful adventure for the reader from the start (a staged wild west shootout) to the novel's resolution (can't tell you that here). Just great writing and a wonderful story. This novel rocks.