COLD SHOT TO THE HEART

Crissa never wants to hurt people. All she wants is their money.

Crissa Stone. Is that her real name? Hard to tell. She’s also Roberta Summersfield and Linda Hendryx. She has credit cards serving a variety of names and accounts in multiple banks. Painstakingly, she’s prepared herself to vanish at any given moment. She has to. She’s a world-class thief. She’s learned from the best, but even the best in this chancy vocation is liable to misstep, which is why Wayne Boudreaux, her mentor and lover, is in a Texas slammer with seven years still to serve. Too long, thinks Crissa; prison is murdering him. Wayne has a parole hearing coming up, but there are black marks on his prison record, problems that $250,000 spent cleverly might help erase. To Crissa, that means work she’d have ducked in different circumstances: the hijacking of a high-stakes poker game. There’s a fatal shooting—not by Crissa, but that scarcely matters. Suddenly, she’s on the run. Someone wants vengeance. Someone else wants the game’s takings. Enter Eddie Santiago. He has another name, too. They call him Eddie the Saint, but he’s the very devil.

Another fast, taut winner from Stroby (Gone ’til November, 2010, etc.) As for Crissa, she may be crime fiction’s best bad girl ever.