A Fistful of Rain (Mass Market Paperback)

by Greg Rucka (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Miriam "Mim" Bracca's career seems to be unraveling--almost as fast as her life. After hitting the bottle too hard while on tour with her rock band, Tailhook, the 26-year-old guitarist is sent home to Portland, Oregon, where she's expected to get some rest and get her head back in the music game. But as Greg Rucka makes clear in A Fistful of Rain, nothing remotely close to relaxation is in Mim's immediate future.

Even before she can get through the front door of her house, Mim is kidnapped at gunpoint, forced into a truck and told to strip, then driven around for a while before being dumped back where she started, bewildered but unmolested. Shortly thereafter, nude photos of her turn up on the Internet, and her drug-dealing brother, Mikel--whom Mim fears helped make this pornography possible--is shot to death. The musician is quick to blame Mikel's murder on their father, Tommy, who's just won release after spending 15 years in prison for killing Mim's mom; yet she concedes that such premeditated violence is probably beyond him. "He wasn't a planner," Mim says of the hated Tommy. "He was like me; life happened to us, we didn't do things to life." But then, who else would want to hasten the destruction this woman has already been bringing on herself? To find out, the petite and pissed-off Mim will have to elude police, confront a blackmailer in Portland's "shanghai tunnels," and stay sober long enough to stay alive.

Rucka brings the same cinematic storytelling, sharp plot twists, and quirky characterizations to A Fistful of Rain that have won his Atticus Kodiak novels praise. His portrayal of Mim Bracca is thoughtfully nuanced, her credibility as a heroine drawn from her weaknesses, rather than cobbled together from unexpected strengths. Too bad he wasn't as conscientious with other players here, such as Tailhook diva Vanessa Parada, who's given barely enough dimension to anchor her competitive claws; or Detective Tracy Hoffman, whose lesbian attraction to Mim is more the product of male fantasy than a significant addition to this yarn. Although readers can solve many of Rucka's puzzles before Mim does, the fraught relationship between this guitarist and her dad, as well as a turnaround ending, prevent A Fistful of Rain from ever seeming dry. --J. Kingston Pierce --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
You're young, beautiful, and the guitarist for a popular rock group. Then, without warning, you're fired from the group (you also like to drink a little too much), and, when you come home to L.A., you're immediately abducted, piled into the back of a truck, ordered to strip naked, and then, inexplicably, returned to your doorstep unharmed. Oh, and your father, serving a lengthy prison term, has been released without warning. This is Mim Bracca's story (or the beginning of it, anyway), and it's told with such immediacy, in such you-are-there detail, that readers will feel like they're living it, too. Narrated by Bracca, it's a thriller in which the heroine is totally incapable of dealing with the pressure yet somehow manages to dredge up the strength to fight. It's a story about family secrets, about a past that can't be kept hidden forever, about love and betrayal and murder. Rucka has already written a fistful of successful novels, but this may be his most memorable so far. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553581821
• ISBN-13: 978-0553581829