The gypsies are back, and that means Dan Kearny Associates are soon up to their collective skip-tracing necks in stolen monkeys, conned emeralds, phoney fortune-tellers, aged husbands married and murdered, and, at the root of it, the killing of pickpocket Ephrem Poteet, allegedly by his ex-wife Yana, who you might remember getting involved with Larry Ballard when DKA were trying to repro those thirty-two Cadillacs in the novel of the same name. Yana's already been banished from the tribe, but you just can't keep a good woman down. And if it isn't the gypsies it's Dan being sued for beating up a car owner, or the joke-spinning cops known as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or even an off-stage walk-on for Mike Connelly's Harry Bosch… which is the first I recall for Gores since Kearny opened a door to find Richard Stark's Parker staring at him. In case you're slow on the uptake, you may intuit from the above that this book is a lot of fun, with more twists than Chubby Checker on crystal meth and Gores' usual firm grasp of character (which is more than you can expect from gypsies, or any of the other greedy hucksters out there). My one-man campaign to get Joe into print in Britain continues. He's been too good for too long not to be.
