Coming from Stark House
From Booklist (advanced review)
Rabe, Peter. My Lovely Executioner/Agreement to Kill. 2006.
289p. Stark House, $19.95 (97819333586113). Though the titles
attached to Rabe's pulp thrillers often appear to have been
chosen by a dart-throwing editor in the basement office of a
seedy publishing house, the words inside were chosen with a
precision belied by the speed with which they were written.
Rabe can pack more into 10 words than most writers can do
with a page: "Jessie sat next to me, but it was just
clothes." In My Lovely Executioner, Jimmy Gallivan finds
himself busted out of prison against his will-he only has
three weeks left to serve on a seven-year sentence-because
someone important thinks he knows something he can't
remember. In Agreement to Kill, Jake Spinner walks out of
prison on his own, having served his time, into an old grudge
match that soon takes an unpredictable turn. Executioner is a
tightly wound, claustrophobic thriller with a can't-miss
predicament, while Agreement, a skosh less successful, is
almost a character study, as we watch would-be criminal
Spinner try to kill his humanity. Not all of Rabe's efforts
gleam quite so brightly, but these reprints prove the
publisher knows how to mine for gold. -Keir Graff
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