As the title of Lawrence Block’s LUCKY AT CARDS has it, Bill Maynard is good with kings and queens, mostly because he has an ace up his sleeve. When caught cheating in Chicago, his angry poker mates do a number of his teeth and tell him to leave town. So he does, with the intent of staying long enough only for a dentist to fix his choppers.
But when the dentist invites him to his friends’ regular poker game, the money-hungry Bill sees an easy target – namely Murray Rogers, a wealthy lawyer who’s all too trusting. And then Bill meets Murray’s wife – she of the “hooker’s hips and queen-sized breasts and a belly that had just the right amount of bulge to it” – and sees her as an easy target, too … just with an entirely different objective in mind, one involving an area below the belt.
Originally a 1964 quickie published under a pseudonym, Hard Case Crime restores Block’s good name to LUCKY, and he has nothing to be ashamed of, having whipped up a good-ol’-fashioned con using all the classic elements: a sympathetic crook protagonist, a blowhard rich guy and his 20-years-younger scorching-hot wife who’s got the goods to lure the former into helping her turn against the latter (in Block’s prose, their sexual encounters are the cleanest dirty romps you’ll read all year). She has designs on Murray’s money, but if she divorces him or moves, she gets zilch. The only out seems to be murder, until Bill comes up with a frame-up that’s better.
Well, at least on paper. Because if something didn’t go wrong, there’d be no novel. Bill is an expert at sleight of hand, but so is Block, and he throws a new wrinkle in the last 10 pages that most other authors would require 100 to write their way out of it. But Block does it with such speed and assurance, and it results in an ending that’s not the expected, even if it does leave you with a smile. –Rod Lott
“Now, nude, she was a goddess. The tips of her flawless breasts were stiff with preliminary passion. Her hips flared in an obscene invitation to Paradise. … I stood very still and she came closer. Her breasts jutted out like mortar shells. I could smell her perfume mingling with the hot animal scent of her body. … At first our lips just touched. Then a few bombs exploded and a few bells rang and all bets were off. … I filled my hands with the bounty of her breasts and she made little animal sounds from somewhere deep in her throat.”
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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE BURGLAR WHO THOUGHT HE WAS BOGART by Lawrence Block
• THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART by Lawrence Block
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