In Shannon's second stand-alone thriller (after 2003's Man Eater
), a tough PR exec and a hapless football pro face off over an unborn child and a betting slip that might be worth seven figures—and that's before
things start to get complicated. Raygene Price, "a tight end out of Florida State... blessed with soft hands, 4.9 speed, and the body of a Greek god," signed with the Dallas Cowboys for a chunk of change, much of which he promptly lost on failed real estate schemes. Raygene is equally careless about birth control; he's impregnated several women who have later made financial demands. One of them, at least, is no ordinary starstruck bimbo: Reece (short for Clarice) Germaine, a smart, tough "major player" in entertainment public relations, decides to have Price's baby and turns up her nose at the payoff suggested by Raygene's mother, his new business manager. She's got a fallback: the Super Bowl betting slip that Raygene ("Gene the Dream") bought in serious violation of league rules and gave to Reece as a seduction gambit. Other players want pieces of Raygene's dwindling funds, especially a really nasty (and somewhat unbelievable) childhood friend, a white drug dealer named Trip Stiles "who suffers the delusion he's black." Everything comes to a head in Las Vegas on Super Bowl Sunday, and there's loads of action and double-crossing. The problem is that the center of it all, Raygene, is a very dim bulb, and not even a very likable one. But the pace is fast and the plot suitably outrageous. (Feb.)
Forecast:
PW called
Man Eater "the best rip-off of an Elmore Leonard novel since Elmore Leonard," and while Shannon (the pseudonym for mystery series veteran Gar Anthony Haywood)
aims for similar flash and comic thrills, fans of Leonard and Shannon both may be a bit disappointed
.
