A bracing and ingeniously cast L.A. crime novel from Edgar Award–winner Thomas Perry   An aging but formidable strip club owner, Claudiu “Manco” Kapak, is robbed by a masked gunman as he places his cash receipts in a bank’s night-deposit box. Enraged, he sends out half a dozen security men to find the witless culprit. Their search leads them to Joe Carver, an innocent but hardly defenseless newcomer who evades capture and sets out to make Kapak wish he’d targeted someone else. Meanwhile, the real burglar, Jefferson Davis Falkins, and his new girlfriend Carrie seem to believe they’ve found a whole new profession: robbing Manco Kapak. Lieutenant Nick Slosser, the police detective in charge of the puzzling and increasingly violent case, has his own troubles, including worries about how he’s going to afford to send the oldest child of each of his two bigamous marriages to college without making their mothers suspicious.
