Customer Reviews

Miami Purity: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read Miami Purity when it first came out and have been waiting patiently for Hendricks' next book. I'm waiting for Iguana Love to arrive in my mailbox now.

Writers tell us lies about life because publishers pay them to do so. If you run a search on my name here, you'll see why I think that. Every once in a while, quite possibly by mistake, the filter fails and somebody honest slips through. We've got Vicki Hendricks among us now, and I hope she lasts a good long while and writes many more books like this one.

This is a book that lets you see into a woman's head the way some rare male writers occasionally let you see into the heads of men, without wallpapering the set with fairy tales. The woman in the story will scare you, and she should.

Ms. Hendricks, if you read this: Well done!

This is the poet of my peeps.

Miami Purity begins with a white trash Sherri/Cherry sitting around with her boyfriend/husband Hank listening to country music and he smacks her. She smacks him back with the boom box. He dies. Then it gets good. Real good.

I kept thinking about when I was a kid, how we'd mark the good parts of the book. The whole novel is the good parts.

Seriously, Hendricks masters the voice and perspective of an unreliable narrator, a white trash girl moving into her middle years and trying desperately to change herself into something for which she has no role model--a middle class wife. Unfortunately, her quest to transform herself is doomed by associations that are more perverse and malicous than the bikers and dope addicts and horn dogs that populated her previous "dance career."

This is a great novel, a brilliant new perspective, on life and death as it actually happens all around us.

William Crosby

Cleveland

Wow. I found this author by reading her great short story ("Stormy, Mon Amour") in the Tart Noir collection, and I'm glad I did. Sherise Parlay is oversexed white trash with a tendency to show off her chest, among other things. Trying to clean up her life, she takes a job at a dry-cleaner's and plans to score the seemingly straight-laced manager's son. But Payne Mahoney is a very disturbing man, and Sherri's changing, too. Sure to stick in your head, this will change the way you think about dry-cleaning. (A+)

While you might find fault with this zippy and startling book, you cannot afford to miss it if you're the least bit interested in this genre. Tough guys doing the same thing become famous and beloved characters, but it seems this sexy, ballsy female heroine upsets people. Why? Read it and see. No one writes tough-girl dialogue as well as Hendricks. Perversion? Sure...the main character certainly is--she uses people...she uses men as sex objects. I found her unforgettable and the writing equal to any author in this genre. The fact that she repulses so many readers only shows how powerful and unnnerving this anti-heroine is....

I had never read a fiction noir before. Reading this book has made me want to read more fiction noir. True, this is not a book for everyone. The language is sharp. The dialogues are crisp and raw. The story is dark yet plausible.

I read the book in one sitting. Detractors may wish to trash this book as a jerk-off companion, but this book is about dark, perverse and depraved human passions, lust and lies.

I read Vicki Hendricks' Miami Purity in one sitting--twice. No female in America even gets close to handling noir fiction the way Hendricks does--this is unblinking, unsquinting, truth-telling wrapped in a terrific story. The character of Sherri Parlay has no equal, and when it comes to writing about sex and obession, either does Hendricks! Finally. This book is liberated and liberating. I can't wait to read her next book, Iguana Love.

I bought this book for a light read, and was surprised by how well the author has developed the heroine's character. She gets you into a really twisted mind. I caught myself a couple of times nodding along with the woman's thoughts, then coming quickly to the realization that these thoughts were only normal to this perversely sweet woman/girl. I liked the book very much.

sherri reminds me of a woman i met on a greyhound bus the first time i went to san francisco from louisiana. every thing you could want in a crime novel. vicki must have hammett swimming in her dna....

Sherri Parlay just wants to turn her life around, hitting mid thirties she's had enough of taking her clothes off at a strip club for a living and wants something a little less risky and little more 9 to 5. That's how she ends up at Miami Purity, a family owned dry cleaning business headed up by a mother son combo. The son, Payne, in particular, is all the drive she needs to leave the life behind and start afresh and in no time at all she's up to her neck in garments, Payne and normalcy. Being a Vicki Hendricks novel this doesn't last as Sherri's other brain (not dissimilar to the one blokes have) leads her back to her former haunts and party girl ways. Somehow, Hendricks, makes accidental murder seem OK - as each body feel I thought to myself 'well sure I could see how easily that could happen' - the noir in this is that no murder is accident, and Sherri herself is cool, calm and calculated in the quest to achieve what she so desires. The Foreword by Ken Bruen and Afterword by Megan Abbott were nice editions and added a little something retrospectively to the think tank - 4 stars.

This is a sad and funny slice of life. Brutal and absurd and full of wrong turns. Like life itself, then. I read Miami Purity for the first time over then years ago. And again, recently,. I loved it even more this time.James M Cain would be proud.