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The Takedown
by Patrick Quinlan
295pp, Headline Review, pounds 19.99
Admirers of Elmore Leonard occasionally worry that this energetic author (now 81) could start slowing down in about 30 years' time, so begin looking for his heir. Patrick Quinlan's debut, Smoked (2006), was gratefully received, and he shows equal promise in The Takedown, an artfully plotted yarn in which the hero, Dick Miller, finds his girlfriend's corpse in the boot of his car. He is a bit hazy on whether he killed her himself, as he is on the location of the million dollars she embezzled and left in safe-deposit boxes.
Quinlan has something of Leonard's gift for making his amoral cast sympathetic, even lovable, though the real baddie, the bullet- riddled Nestor Garcia, is memorably nasty.
Not Dead Enough
by Peter James