Higgins, George V

New York. 1973. March 1973. Knopf. 1st American Edition. Previous Owner's Name Penned in Front, Otherwise Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394483162. 218 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Hal Siegel. keywords: Literature America Boston. FROM THE PUBLISHER - With all his brilliance of suspense, verisimilitude, and ‘dialogue so authentic it spits,' George V. Higgins floodlights the murky area of the city - his setting once more is Boston - where the borders between legitimate and criminal enterprise vanish in a fog of greed, and violence is just around the corner. This is how a slick (Beacon Street) setup like the Regent Sportsmen's Club, Inc., works. It's an air charter operation: package tours to top casinos. What its clients - respectable businessmen hooked on gambling - don't know is that in addition to the front man, a seemingly respectable ex-stockbroker, one of the partners is a Mafia connection and the third, put in by the Mob, is ‘the Greek,' the loan shark who collects the markers. A smooth enterprise, neat, profitable, until. . That's where the Digger comes in. The Digger is Jerry Doherty, proprietor of a workingman's bar, who supplements his income with occasional odd jobs like stealing live checks or picking up hot goods. He contrives to stay out of jail (his brother, a priest, has political clout). But they've hooked the not-so-respectable Digger with a bargain fare on a half-empty plane to Vegas, and now he owes $18,000 and the Greek is crowding him. The partners are scared the Creek isn't up to tangling with a tough proposition like the Digger. The Don himself is nervous. The smooth enterprise gets rough - and one thing seems more and more certain: whether it's the Digger or the Greek or the ex-broker or the Mafia man, someone's going to die. In scene after scene - as the novel rushes toward its violent climax - Higgins makes overwhelmingly real the world of the loan shark, the world of the Mafia-connected businessman, the machinery of their operations, and the inevitable semi-pros who, like the Digger, grease, and sometimes jam, the gears. inventory #28198 ISBN: 0394483162.