Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin (USA 1995)

From the Publisher:
It began with the murder of the adulterous wife of a mild-mannered professor. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth. After that, the killer who called himself Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys, and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota. And the final truth about his death trip will not be revealed until the last victim is claimed.

Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0446403903 (December, 1995), 367 p., $5.50.

Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin (USA 1994)

From the Publisher:
The San Francisco Chronicle called Joe Gores' Dead Man "a rollercoaster ride of outrageous plot twists, vicious double-crosses and a gloriously violent, double-barreled finale." Gores' previous novel, 32 Cadillacs, was praised as "a work of large and breathtaking inventiton" by the Los Angeles Trmes Book Review. Now Joe Gores further rolls back the boundaries of crime fiction with a novel that is as visionary as it is thrilling.

ln a university auditorium a paleoanthropologist expounds on the nature of life itself: creationism, Darwinism and human and primate violence. In the audience is Organized Crime Task Force detective Dante Stagnaro. Run ragged by a killer who calls himself Raptor, Stagnaro knows that the end of his long hunt is here, in this auditorium. The speaker is the last man on Raptors hit list.

It began with me murder of the professor's beautiful adulterous wife. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth. Thereafter, Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota, killing with cheap handguns, a sniper rifle, even in-close, wet-work weapons. And after each hit came the phone call to Stagnaro in Raptor's disguised, taunting voice.

Stagnaro knows the assassin's victims share a common bond. He is sure the protessor's wife died for what she knew about the others. But as Raptor keeps killing, Stagnaro has only the jagged, broken pieces ol a menacing puzzle. Now the cop, a man of the earth and of the hunt, listens to the professor addressing the auditorium, peering into the soul of mankind and the eye of God Himself. And, as he listens, he waits for Raptor to strike one last time.

A brutally realistic view of high-echelon criminality, an intense, Dostoevskian duel of wits, and a tour de force of intellectual inquiry, MENACED ASSASSIN is a truly unforgettable novel - a masterpiece from a great American writer.

Joe Gores: Menaced Assassin. A Novel. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0892965428 (October, 1994), 341 p., $19.95.