Crashed (Junior Bender #1): A Junior Bender Mystery by Timothy Hallinan (English

Description: Crashed (Junior Bender #1) by Timothy Hallinan Paperback edition includes a sneak preview from the next Junior Bender mystery, "Little Elvises." FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description INTRODUCING JUNIOR BENDER, THE FAVORITE BURGLAR-TURNED-PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR OF HOLLYWOOD CROOKSJunior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. Since he first started breaking into houses when he was fourteen years old, hes never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years of an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Treys porn movie venture, which someone keeps sabotaging. The star Trey has lined up to do all thats unwholesome on camera is Thistle Downing, Americas beloved child star, who now lives alone in a drug-induced stupor, destitute and uninsurable. Her starring role will be the scandalous fall-from-grace gossip of rubber-neckers across the country. No wonder Trey needs help keeping the production on track.Junior knows what that he should do-get Thistle out and find her help-but doing the right thing will land him on the wrong side of LAs scariest mob boss. With the help of his precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Rina, and his criminal sidekick, Louie the Lost (an ex-getaway driver), Junior has to figure out a miracle solution.From the Hardcover edition. Notes The first in a new series of crime novels featuring Junior Bender, a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. From the author of The Fear Artist. Author Biography Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of thirteen widely praised books-twelve novels and a work of nonfiction-including the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillersand the following two Junior Bender investigations, Little Elvises and The Fame Thief. In 2010, Hallinan conceived and edited an ebook of original short stories by twenty mystery writers,Shaken- Stories for Japan, with 100% of the proceeds going to Japanese disaster relief.From the Hardcover edition. Review Praise for Crashed"If youre looking for a mystery with a fresh new hero then youll want to run right out and get this book. Its just fabulous. If you have a plane to take, then this is the book to grab."—NPRs Morning Edition"Loved loved loved Crashed, Tim Hallinans first Junior Bender mystery. Great narrative voice, complex plot, 3-D characters. Hallinans deft comic tone and colorful characters have earned him comparisons to Donald Westlake and Carl Hiassen. Check it out now." —Nancy Pearl"If Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake had a literary love child, he would be Timothy Hallinan. The Edgar nominees laugh-out-loud new crime series featuring Hollywood burglar-turned-private eye Junior Bender has breakout written all over it... A must-read." —Julia Spencer-Fleming, New York Times bestselling author of One Was a Soldier"Junior Bender is todays Los Angeles as Raymond Chandler might have written it. Tim [Hallinan] is a master at tossing out the kind of hard-boiled lines that I wish I thought of first."—Bruce DeSilva, Macavity & Edgar Award-winning author of Rogue Island"Timothy Hallinans affable antihero, an accomplished thief but inept sleuth named Junior Bender, makes a terrific first impression in Crashed.... Benders quick wit and smart mouth make him a boon companion on this oddball adventure."—New York Times"A fresh turn on Raymond Chandler... In Crashed, Hallinans fabulously convoluted, wise-guy detective potboiler featuring Bender, the California authors voice — intelligent, sarcastic, profane but never coarse, unfailingly honest — is like a fast ride over a potholed road in a vintage Cadillac."—San Antonio Express-News "This is Hallinan at the top of his game. Its laugh-out-loud funny without ever losing any of its mystery. Its a whole new style and I love it. Junior Bender—a crook with a heart of gold—is one of Hallinans most appealing heroes, rich with invention, and brimming with classic wit. I cant recommend it highly enough." —Shadoe Stevens, Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson"The story is well designed and well told, and the dialogue sparkles. In a genre perhaps slightly overstuffed with crook-heroes, the book is like a breath of fresh air."—Booklist"This is one of those books you long for, wait for, and find once or twice a year"—Beth Kanell, proprietor of Kingdom Books, Vermont"This fast-paced first in a series is great fun."—Stop Youre Killing Me (blog)"Timothy Hallinan does everything a writer should do whose goal is to keep a reader entertained from the first sentence to the last."—Tzer Island (blog)"Hallinan builds a believable plot, filled with both humor and pathos."—Reviewing the Evidence (blog)"The writing is intelligent, relaxed, and fun to read. Crashed is a pleasurable outing, without the personal risk, to the criminal underbelly of Los Angeles, where moral ambiguity fills the air."—Read Me Deadly (blog)"This detective potboiler with its oddball characters will keep you chuckling." —The Marthas Vineyard Times"If youre in the mood for a mystery thats just plain fun, this is the one for you... Timothy Hallinan knows how to write a smart aleck main character who has his own set of morals and a heart of gold." —Kittling Books (blog)Praise for Junior Bender"Timothy Hallinans The Fame Thief has everything Ive come to expect in a Hallinan novel: indelible, complex characters, fantastic plot, and moments of hold-your-breath suspense."—Charlaine Harris, author of the New York Times bestselling Sookie Stackhouse series"Could not stop laughing. Tim Hallinan is sharp as a blade, has a wicked eye for human nature and keeps the reader guessing and rooting for Junior Bender all the way."—Helen Simonson, New York Times bestselling author of Major Pettigrews Last Stand"Junior Bender is bound to be the topic of conversation amongst book lovers and crime fiction fans for a long, long time." —Robert Carraher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer "Hugely,splendidly entertaining... Full of delightful characters, and dialogue that provides at least one good laugh on every page, the book is so hard to put down youll swear its been glued to your hands."—Booklist, STARRED Review (Little Elvises) Review Quote Praise for Crashed "If youre looking for a mystery with a fresh new hero then youll want to run right out and get this book. Its just fabulous. If you have a plane to take, then this is the book to grab." --NPRs Morning Edition "Loved loved loved Excerpt from Book If Id liked expressionism, I might have been okay. But the expressionists dont do anything for me, dont even make my palms itch. And Klee especially doesnt do anything for me. My education, spotty as it was, pretty much set my Art Clock to the fifteenth century in the Low Countries. If it had been Memling or Van der Weyden, one of the mystical Flemish masters shedding Gods Dutch light on some lily-filled annunciation, I would have been looking at the picture when I took it off the wall. As it was, I was looking at the wall. So I saw it, something I hadnt been told would be there. Just a hairline crack in the drywall, perfectly circular, maybe the size of a dinner plate. Seen from the side, by someone peeking behind the painting without moving it, which is what most thieves would do in this sadly mistrustful age of art alarms, it would have been invisible. But Id taken the picture down, and there it was. And Im weak. I think for everyone in the world, theres something you could dangle in front of them, something they would run onto a freeway at rush hour to get. When I meet somebody, I like to try to figure out what that is for that person. You for diamonds, darling, or first editions of Dickens? Jimmy Choo shoes or a Joseph Cornell box? And you, mister, a thick stack of green? A troop of Balinese girl scouts? A Maserati with your monogram on it? For me, its a wall safe. From my somewhat specialized perspective, a wall safe is the perfect object. To you, it may be a hole in the wall with a door on it. To me, its one hundred percent potential. Theres absolutely no way to know whats in there. You can only be sure of one thing: Whatever it is, it means a hell of a lot to somebody. Maybe its what theyd run into traffic for. A wall safe is just a question mark. With an answer inside. Janice hadnt told me there would be a safe behind the picture. Wed discussed everything but that. And, of course, that-- meaning the thing I hadnt anticipated--was what screwed me. What Janice and I had mostly talked about was the front door. "Think baronial," shed said with a half-smile. Janice had the half-smile down cold. "The front windows are seven feet from the ground. Youd need a ladder just to say hi." "How far from the front door to the curb?" The bar we were in was way south of the Boulevard, in Reseda, far enough south that we were the only people in the place who were speaking English, and Serenas Greatest Hits was on permanent loop. The air was ripe with cilantro and cumin, and the place was mercifully lacking in ferns and sports memorabilia. A single widescreen television, ignored by all, broadcast the soccer game. I am personally convinced that only one soccer game has ever actually been played, and they show it over and over again from different camera angles. As always, Janice had chosen the bar. With Janice in charge of the compass, it was possible to experience an entire planets worth of bars without ever leaving the San Fernando Valley. The last one wed met in had been Lao, with snacks of crisp fish bits and an extensive lineup of obscure tropical beers. "Seventy-three feet, nine inches." She broke off the tip of a tortilla chip and put it near her mouth. "Theres a black slate walk that kind of curves up to it." I was nursing a Negra Modelo, the king of Hispanic dark beers, and watching the chip, calculating the odds against her actually eating it. "Is the door visible from the street?" "Its so completely visible," shed said, "that if you were a kid in one of those 40s musicals and you decided to put on a show, the front door of the Huston house is where youd put it on." "Makes the back sound good," Id said. "Aswarm with rottweilers." She sat back, the jet necklace at her throat sparkling wickedly and the overhead lights flashing off the rectangular, black-framed glasses she wore in order to look like a businesswoman but which actually made her look like a beautiful girl wearing glasses. Burglars, of which I am one, dont like Rottweilers. "But theyre not in the house, right? Tell me theyre not in the house." "They are not. One of them pooped on the Missuss ninety thousand-dollar Kirghiz rug." Janice powdered the bit of chip between her fingers and let it fall to her napkin. "Or I should say, one of the Missuss ninety thousand-dollar Kirghiz rugs." "There are several women called Missus?" I asked. "Or several rugs?" "Either way," Janice said, reproachfully straightening her glasses at me. "The dogs are kept in back, and they get fed like every other Friday." "Meaning no going in through the back," I said. "Not unless you want to be kibble," Janice said. "Or the side, either. The wall around the yard is flush with the front wall of the house." "Speaking of kibble." "Please do," Janice said. "I so rarely get a chance to." "Does anyone drop by to feed the beasts? Am I likely to run into--" "No one in his right mind would go into that yard. The only way to feed them would be to throw a bison over the walls. The Hustons have a very fancy apparatus, looks like it was built for the space shuttle. Delivers precise amounts of ravening beastfood twice a day. So theyre strong and healthy and the old killer instinct doesnt dim." "So," I said. "Its the front door." She used the tip of her index finger to slide her glasses down to the point of her perfect nose, and looked at me over them. "Afraid so." I drained my beer and signaled for another. Janice took a demure sip of her tonic and lime. I said, "I hate front doors. Im going to stand there for fifteen minutes, trying to pick a lock in plain sight." "Thats why we came to you," she said. "Mr. Ingenuity." "You came to me," I said, "because you know this is the week I pay my child support." Janice was a back-and-forth, working for three or four brokers, guys with clients who knew where things were and wanted those things, but werent sufficiently hands-on to grab them for themselves. Shed used me before, and it had worked out okay. She didnt know Id backtracked her to two of her employers. One of them, an international-grade fence called Stinky Tetweiler, weighed 300 hard-earned pounds and lived in a long, low house south of the Boulevard with an ever-changing number of very young Filipino men with very small waists. Like a lot of the bigger houses south of Ventura, Stinkys place had once belonged to a movie star, back when the Valley was movie-star territory. In the case of Stinkys house, the star was Alan Ladd, although Stinky had rebuilt the house into a sort of collision between tetrahedrons that would have had old Alans ghost, had he dropped by, looking for the front door. Janices other client, known to the trade only as Wattles, worked out of an actual office, with a desk and everything, in a smoked-glass high-rise on Ventura near the 405 Freeway. His company was listed on the building directory as Wattles Inc. Wattles himself was a guy who had looked for years like he would die in minutes. He was extremely short, with a belly that suggested an open umbrella, a drinkers face the color of rare roast beef, and a game leg that he dragged around like an anchor. Id hooked onto his back bumper one night and followed him up into Benedict Canyon until he slowed the car to allow a massive pair of wrought-iron gates to swing open, then took a steep driveway up into the pepper trees. But Janice wasnt aware I knew any of this. And if she had been, she wouldnt have been amused at all. "Wheres the streetlight?" She gave me her bad-news smile, brave and full of fraudulent compassion. "Right in front. More or less directly over the end of the sidewalk." "Illuminating the front door." "Brilliantly," she said. "Dont think about the front door. Think about whats on the other side." "I am," I said. "Im thinking I have to carry it seventy-three feet and nine inches to the van. Under a streetlight." "You always focus on the negative," she said. "You need to do something about that. You want your positive energy to flow straight and true, and every time you go to the negative, you put up a little barrier. If it werent for your constant focus on negative energy, your marriage might have gone better." God, the things women think they have the right to say. "My marriage went fine," I said. "It was before the marriage went that was difficult." "You have to be positive about that, too," she said. "Without the marriage, you wouldnt have Rina." Ahh, Rina, twelve years old and the light of my life. "To the extent I have her, anyway." She gave me the slow nod women use to indicate that they understand our pain, they admire the courage with which we handle it, and theyre absolutely certain that its all our fault. "I know its tough, Kathy being so punitive with visitation. But shes your daughter. Youve got to be happy about that." Janice put down her glass and patted me comfortingly on the wrist wi Description for Sales People Laugh-out-loud investigations starring heart-of-gold-thief Junior Bender. The series has been well received by reviewers and critics, the first has been described as a breakout. From the Edgar-nominated author of The Fear Artist (Soho Press, 2012), which is also available from Turnaround. The next book in the series, Little Elvises, is also available in June 2013. Details ISBN1616952768 Author Timothy Hallinan Language English ISBN-10 1616952768 ISBN-13 9781616952761 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2013 Imprint Soho Press Inc Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Subtitle A Junior Bender Mystery Short Title CRASHED Series Number 1 AU Release Date 2013-04-23 NZ Release Date 2013-04-23 US Release Date 2013-04-23 UK Release Date 2013-04-23 Publisher Soho Press Inc Publication Date 2013-04-23 DEWEY 813.54 Audience General Pages 384 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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