Billy Straight - Hardcover

Kellerman, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679459596 ISBN 13: 9780679459590

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1999

Synopsis

When twelve-year-old Billy Straight, a runaway struggling to survive L.A.'s most dangerous streets, becomes the sole eyewitness to a brutal murder, he becomes the target of the media, bounty hunters, and a killer, as L.A.P.D. homicide detective Petra Connor races against time to save his life. 325,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

There are few writers practising in the crime and thriller field with the assurance and skill of Kellerman, and this latest jumbo-sized outing is well up to par. While the plotting may be more diffuse than usual, the rich panoply of characters created here soon ensures a compelling read. When a young boy witnesses a murder, he finds himself pursued by both the police and the killer. The killing (of a beautiful young woman, Lisa Ramsey, in Los Angeles' Griffith Park) soon has Detective Petra Connor and her partner Stu Bishop involved. The principal suspect is her husband, TV star Cart Ramsey, who had beaten her up. And the echoes of the OJ Simpson case has the LAPD brass keen to avoid a repetition of history. Along with a gift for making a now-familiar locale seem fresh and unusual, Kellerman's ace in the hole has always been dialogue: rudimentary and lacking in any true-life resonance in so many thrillers, razor-sharp in Kellerman. With a cannily drawn heroine and a scarifying vision of the political blood-letting within a major us police force, this is a different kind of thriller to such earlier winners as Blood Test, but none the worse for that. Perhaps Kellerman is only just beginning to show us what he can do. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

Strong insights into the quirks of human and criminal behaviour (Guardian)

Filled with insight (Stephen King)

Coolly intelligent (GQ)

A sense of humanity and justice (Publishers Weekly)

An alert eye for detail (New York Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679459596
• ISBN 13: 9780679459590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 467