WEBORGERS - Hard-Boiled Mysteries

BOOK REVIEW by E.Borgers

EAST OF A -by Russel Atwood

Ballantine Hardcover
Published: Feb 1999

===================================== Review by E.Borgers
=====================================

What happens when you are dressed-up, wearing a golden Rolex and crossing New York streets you are not too familiar with?
Payton Sherwood got the answer quickly: You meet punks, a damsel in distress and . . . you say, "Adios, golden watch!!"

Payton lives in the East part of New York City where he tries to survive as a young PI. It's in the East Village and environs of Alphabet City that he will undertake a personal search to retrieve the damsel and his watch. He will, in fact, find more than he bargained for and the whole thing will quickly spell trouble!
Thugs and would-be mobsters will teach Payton that wandering in NYC's streets is a dangerous business. All this, not mentioning the corpses he starts to find around him . . .

In a rapid and vivid style of writing, Atwood tells us the Payton saga, strolling among homeless people in a part of New York the author knows very well.
Deformed colloquialisms, slang and invention of words, with a tint of irony, all participate to re-create a style close to that of some of the hard-boiled pulp stories. But we personally feel that the real power of the writer lays in a more descriptive style he uses from time to time in this book.

"East of A" is a rather short novel, with the classic ingredients of hard-boiled plots, but has a tone of its own, in which New York's East Village plays an important part.
Maybe the villains could be a little bit more frightening and Payton's relations could receive deeper attention, but this does not spoil the good read this novel offers.
We definitely look forward to checking out the second novel of Russel Atwood.

E.Borgers - 15 January 1999
Copyright © 1999, E.Borgers

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