The Players

Reynolds takes leave of the pre-Civil War West (Franklin's Crossing, 1992) in this hard-driving yarn brimming with the dregs of today's Texas underworld: self-styled mob bosses, shysters, con artists, pimps, whores, burned-out cops and other assorted redneck losers. Antihero Eddy Lovell is a well-born but ill-omened ex-SMU football jock reduced to working as a wheel man for Moria, a Dallas crime boss. When Eddy comes into possession of a briefcase containing two mysterious (and very valuable) compact discs, his low-down, high-society siblings, who want the discs for themselves, devise a ransom scheme involving kidnapping Eddy's daughter. But the abductors get the wrong girl, and the action explodes into a violent car chase, from Hollywood to a southwest Texas state park, with bombings and wholesale executions marking the trail. Despite repetitious exposition and a penchant for the burlesque (including a severed head delivered via FedEx) Reynold's hard-edged prose is well calculated to captivate the reader right up to the final trigger squeeze. Film rights to Daydream Entertainment. (July)