Lesser Connelly: Interesting characters, incident aplenty, but overplotting undermines the mano-a-womano center.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Weird Jack admires lovely Cassie, respects her skill and resourcefulness, and will kill her in a Vegas minute if he has to. What she can’t guess is how quickly Karch (Jack of Spades, they call him, because he likes to digs graves for those he hits) will be sent after it and her. She does the job, then finds, to her astonishment, that the take is not the comfortable $250,000 predicted, but a scary $2.5 mil. to Las Vegas and the Cleopatra Casino, where a mark on an extended hot streak has been pre-selected for her. She needs “the outlaw juice,” she’s discovered, her phrase for the sense of danger that kick-starts and defines her life force. Cassie’s done her time, tried to go straight, failed. Hired to set a trap for Cassie’s larcenous lover, he netted Cassie as well, though only because she couldn’t bear to escape. Karch, a self-congratulatory psychopath, is a casino security agent who moonlights for the mob. And though her resume shows 5 to 15, the fall was only minimally her fault. There’s Cassie Black, for instance (amoral, yes, yet appealingly vulnerable)-a young ex-con who never saw the Vegas high-roller she couldn’t rob.

Not that there aren’t rewards in this story of not-so-good versus evil. Series hero Harry Bosch (Angel’s Flight, 1998, etc.) is on hiatus, and you’ll keep missing him. She’s a thief, he’s a killer, and two and a half million dollars is the issue between them in this dark (and sometimes dreary) thriller.

Mike karch floyd total security