CHASING EIGHTS

“Chasing Eights is a satisfying look at the dark side of the California dream [with] hustlers trying to make a killing in the land of unlimited sunshine. Fortune is hired by the wife of one such dreamer, Jack Price, a Santa Barbara car salesman who’s sunk the family savings into a dubious real estate deal put together by his boss, a slick operator named Ed Brower. Manipulating other folks and their cash is Brower’s specialty, and Ms. Price is afraid her husband — a poor poker player who’s spent his life “chasing eights” — is being set up for a fall.

It’s at a late afternoon poker game in a Victorian house that Fortune first finds Jack Price. He discovers something else on the grounds behind the mansion: the body of Santos Torena, another partner in Brower’s real estate scheme. Price meanwhile wanders off, and Fortune spends the rest of the night and the book (which spans a 24-hour period) trying to catch up with him.

In his travels, the private eye crosses paths with a number of citizens (all wonderfully drawn) whose destinies are entangled, some fatally. Beautifully structured, Chasing Eights slips easily back and forth from Fortune’s first-person narrative to third-person accounts of the other characters’ activities. Well-integrated flashbacks, filled with as much closely observed incident and detail as John O’Hara short stories, provide windows on key moments in these people’s pasts. Chasing Eights is as impressive as any private-eye novel in recent memory.

— Wall Street Journal

“Fully realized characters ... Humming with tensions, this page-turner is first rate.”
— Publishers’ Weekly

“Ironic and insightful ... stimulating and satisfying” — San Diego Union Tribune

“Powerful and daring ... filled with action and suspense....” — Abilene Reporter News

“Put the cards down a moment, read the players’ faces with Fortune, and get back into the game. This one is a sure bet.” — Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel