Awards
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998
A New York Times Notable Book for 1998
Synopses & Reviews
Matt Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. The crime rate's down and the stock market's up. Gentrification's prettying-up the old neighborhood. The New York streets don't look so mean anymore.
Then all hell breaks loose.
Scudder quickly discovers the spruced-up sidewalks are as mean as ever, dark and gritty and stained with blood. He's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question. It's a world where nothing is certain and nobody's safe, a random universe where no one's survival can be taken for granted. Not even his own.
A world where everybody dies.
Review
"[T]he best [Scudder novel] since A Walk Among the Tombstones resonant, thoughtful, richly textured, and capped by a slam-bang windup....Block's seamless weave of thought and action, and his matchless gift for dialogue...have seldom been on more effective display." Publishers Weekly
Review
"One of the most harrowing yet most rewarding chapters in the education of a hero." Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"When Lawrence Block is in his Matt Scudder mode, crime fiction can sidle up so close to literature that often there's no degree of difference....Scudder's complex internal life has never been more deeply plumbed." Philadelphia Inquirer
About the Author
A Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Lawrence Block is a four-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus Awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. The author of more than fifty books and numerous short stories, he is a devout New Yorker who spends much of his time traveling.