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NoirNovels.com - A unique repository for all things noir
Saw Red
Reviewed By Steve Nester Duncan Sloan plays as hard as the people he comes up against in his return in Bob Truluck?s second novel Saw Red. Sloan is the kind of Florida PI whose career staggers somewhere between chasing down repos and working for big money clients. His office is shabby, he has no woman, and if he says he?ll slap you for not following directions, like putting a gun down when he asks, he?ll slap you hard. In Sloan?s world, ?nobody?s out till they?re dead, in this game.? When hooker Terry Sebring comes to Sloan in need of help in finding her Palm Pilot, lost when her car was stolen, Sloan knows it?s not for her day trading files as she claims. A hooker keeps important files, but they usually have to do with clients. In the wrong hands, this could be a hot ticket item. And that?s just where they end up. A small fish gets a hold of them and begins a bush league job of blackmailing the discreet and wealthy men Terry had as customers. A couple of big fish don?t like this; and they have a copy of the client list as well. Their method of silencing the blackmailer is to kill everyone on the list. Sloan finds himself parrying with central Florida orange grove tycoons, nasty lawyers, and freaky televangelists?all of them stinking rich and all of them with the ethics of Orlando trailer trash, which is what most of them were just a generation or two back. Though they may now look like a million bucks, when they?ve left the room the initial impulse is to call the fumigator. Sloan reaches the top of the food chain when meeting Horace Sebring, Terry? s wealthy uncle, and Davis Cambridge, a swamp rat of a lawyer for whom tact and a civil tongue are not the tools of his trade. As the subterfuge of blackmail unravels and the covering up of a decades old murder becomes the real intent of the client deaths, High Class in the red dirt grass lands of hillbilly Florida is laid bare as the font of immeasurable and unsurpassable evil. The family dysfunction is so vicious and amoral it would make even Richard Dawson gag. Give a cracker a little bit of money and he begins to act like he doesn?t have any money at all. Go figure that one. Though it all, Duncan Sloan shows more class than most people have to more people who deserve it less. Aside from the hapless widow of a crack addict and her two filthy children whose husband was on the ground floor of the blackmailing scheme, Sloan is content to let any man dig his own grave, so long as it isn?t anywhere where Sloan can fall into it. |
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