Caught Reading: Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

Hawke's debut novel opens with a horrible crime - a lone gunman attacks the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, before being tracked down by a rogue private investigator. The PI, Fritz Malone, then gets sucked into a plot of criminal conspiracy and police corruption. While Hawke's book has some of the uncomfortable plot shifts of a rookie writer, his creation of the grizzled private eye, Malone, is a masterstroke. Malone seems to have grown whole cloth from the streets of New York with his balckjack, pistol and bevy of wisecracks. This is a character we want to hear more from.

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