TRUST ME, the second novel from Peter Leonard, son of Elmore, shows that he is just not some chip off the old block. Like his father, Peter knows how to tell a story with a colorful set of characters. This one focuses on Karen Delaney, whose track record with men is about as solid as a snowball in hell.
At the start of the book, we find Karen and her boyfriend, Lou, being robbed at gunpoint. She sees it as her opportunity to not only finally drop Lou, but take revenge on her old boyfriend, a bookmaker named Samir. Karen was dumb enough to entrust Samir with a large amount of money that he didn’t give back, once they broke up, so she figures that her best bet to getting it would be to team up with this group of robbers.
The story jumps around a bit so much at first that it might give whiplash to a few readers, with Leonard setting up all the characters and situations so that when the book progresses, he never has to slow down to catch people up. It moves so well that it feels like a movie, since whatever could go wrong does at certain moments. All Karen wants is this operation to go without a hitch or a gunshot, but as soon as the robbery goes down, she has a new set of problems — mainly, the people who work for Samir, all with their own ideas of what to do with the money if they get their hands on it.
This includes a former cop, named O’Clair, now an ex-con who uses his background to track down Karen so he can take the money and run off to retirement. Then there is Samir’s nephew, Ricky, who thinks of this as a sort of windfall, with dreams of going into business for himself. There is also the crew Karen used, whose members can’t believe she just took the money for herself.
The story is told from a variety of perspectives, with the right amount of humor to balance out the sheer brutal violence that is central to this type. Not only will readers devour TRUST ME, but they will want Leoanrd’s next one immediately. He is not one to stand in the shadows of his dad; in fact, he is on pace to make the crime genre his own. It seems that not only the mixture of crime and humor run in the family, but also the idea of characters who could easily step out of the stories, which, for this reviewer, is the best type of writing. —Bruce Grossman
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• QUIVER by Peter Leonard
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