I have to say, whilst this was a reasonable yarn to follow I was left significantly underwhelmed. Chet Conway is a cab driver who only gets involved with things because he is owed some winnings on a horse bet and unfortunately greed appears to be the protagonist's only real trait.
I get pretty tired of super-protagonists (like Jack Reacher) who seem to be everyone's intellectual, moral and physical superior and can not be challenged by anyone. However, the opposite can be similarly disengaging. Chet is not particularly smart, nor tough, nor morally righteous - he just wants his money, is quite lucky and needs a sidekick to get him out of trouble at every turn.
I found myself really struggling to care about the outcome of the book - which incidentally is somewhat of a betrayal and disappointment. I did not care about the characters, many of whom were multiple extrusions from a single typecast dye. On top of all of this there appeared to be about fifty pages in the middle where lots of similar gangsters and cops all tried to do the same thing / believe the same thing over and over again - which was obviously quite mundane.
It was a reasonable bit of pulp to chew through (which is its purpose) but there are a lot of books of a similar ilk that will give you much more satisfaction - whether you are interested in prose, character, or plot.
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