Posts Tagged ‘Lee Child’

Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

February 11th, 2013

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“Fast, hard and knowing: this is an amazing debut full of intrigue, tradecraft and suspense. Read it immediately!” —Lee Child

“This is the debut of a gifted crime writer who will only get better with his next endeavors.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Read an excerpt from Ghostman on RandomHouse.com.

Stunningly dark, hugely intelligent and thoroughly addictive, Roger Hobbs has given us a novel that will immediately place him in the company of our most esteemed crime writers.

When a casino robbery in Atlantic City goes horribly awry, the man who orchestrated it is obliged to call in a favor from someone who’s occasionally called Jack. While it’s doubtful that anyone knows his actual name or anything at all about his true identity, or even if he’s still alive. But within hours a private jet is flying this exceptionally experienced fixer and cleaner-upper right into a spectacular mess: one heister dead in the parking lot, another winged but on the run, the shooter a complete mystery, the $1.2 million in freshly printed bills god knows where and the FBI already waiting for Jack at the airport, to be joined shortly by other extremely interested and elusive parties. And he has only forty-eight hours until the twice-stolen cash literally explodes…

“A slam-bang, pedal-to-the-metal crime story that fires on all cylinders and then some! Ghostman is a gritty, lean, mean adrenaline machine. Mostly, though, it was just plain fun to read. I absolutely loved this book and cannot recommend it highly enough.” —Christopher Reich

“A first novel comes along every few years that clearly separates itself from the field, like Secretariat winning the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. This year’s Secretariat is going to be Ghostman, a propulsive thriller that combines incredible detail and nonstoppable narrative drive….The suspense builds inexorably, heightened by the supportive detail with which Hobbs undergirds the action…. Comparisons to Lee Child are inevitable here, and surely Hobbs possesses a Child-like ability for first unleashing and then shrewdly directing a tornado of a plot, but he also evokes Elmore Leonard in the subtle interplay of his characters. A triumph on every level.” —Bill Ott, Booklist

“This watertight debut [is] at once slick and gritty… Straight out of the gate, Hobbs has mastered the essentials of a contemporary thriller: a noirlike tone, no-nonsense prose and a hero with just enough personality to ensure he doesn’t come off as an amoral death machine [as well as] heart-stopping scenes that illustrate how small mistakes can turn catastrophic.” —Kirkus, starred review

Roger Hobbs graduated in 2011 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he studied ancient languages, film noir, and literary theory. He wrote Ghostman during his senior year.

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