Long Cold Fall - Hardcover

Reaves, Sam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399135650 ISBN 13: 9780399135651

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 1991

Synopsis

The first book in the Cooper MacLeish series, Sam Reaves's debut novel recounts how MacLeish, a Vietnam veteran and Chicago taxi driver, hears of the apparent suicide of a former lover and, investigating, discovers not only that her missing son may be his but also that the suicide hypothesis  doesn't hold water.

About this title

About the Author

Sam Reaves has written seven Chicago-based crime novels, including the Cooper MacLeish series, the Dooley series and the stand-alone Mean Town Blues. As Dominic Martell he has penned a European-based suspense trilogy.  Reaves has traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East but has lived in the Chicago area most of his life.  He has worked as a teacher and a translator.

From the Back Cover

Advance praise for Sam Reaves

"Sam Reaves is too good, he makes me nervous. A Long Cold Fall is as hard and muscular as the early Hammett, and as full of promise."
--Robert B. Parker

"An outstanding mystery writer... Reaves is a first novelist who writes as if he has been doing it for years."
-- Stuart Kaminsky, author of Red Chameleon

From the Inside Flap

Chicago: it's one hell of a town.
Vietnam vet Cooper MacLeish kills his evenings drinking beers at the local pool hall, when he's not jockeying a cab around town to pay the rent. A college graduate on the GI Bill, pushing forty and harboring many deferred dreams, Coop is living from one day to the next until even this fragile structure is shattered by an encounter with a sadistic killer of unparalleled brutality.
All he did was open a newspaper and see a name that once changed his life. Vivian Horstmann, the lithe, elegant and unattainable object of Cooper's college lust, lay dead twenty-three floors below her Lake Shore Drive apartment, but she left a fourteen-year-old son who vanished the day after her death. Still unable to resist Vivian's draw, Coop begins asking questions and soon learns he's not the only one.
Identified only by a jailhouse tattoo of three teardrops meandering down his lean cheek, an unnamed man is weaving through the shadows in Cooper's life, threatening his Puerto Rican girlfriend, Diana, spraying his doorway with gunfire, and practicing home invasion with chilling and gruesome ferocity.
As excited by savagery as a shark is by blood, Teardrop rapidly transforms his mission into an obsessive personal vendetta. Coop must revive all his skills learned in the A Shau Valley and kept alive on Chicago's mean streets to save himself and the boy-- who just might be his son.
In prose reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and Elmore Leonard's La Brava, Sam Reaves' A Long Cold Fall is an explosive first novel from a major new voice in mystery fiction.

Reviews

This impressive mystery debut grabs attention with its opening chapter and never lets up. With both a penchant for trouble and the ability to handle it, Vietnam vet Cooper MacLeish, after completing college on the GI Bill, is drifting through life as a Chicago cab driver. Reading of the apparent suicide of a woman he'd been in love with during his college years, he decides to attend her funeral. Although she hadn't returned his feelings, the two had shared one night of passion. A simple calculation suggests that Cooper might be the father of her teenage son. The youth has disappeared following his mother's death but Cooper finds him, and his argument that his mother was murdered gains added weight when someone seems determined to kill him as well. Cooper eventually pinpoints a surprising suspect (based on coincidental events that constitute the novel's sole jarring note) but, before the story's violent resolution, learns that not all guesses turn out right. Reaves's solid, well-paced mystery features an engaging hero readers will want to meet again.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0399135650
• ISBN 13: 9780399135651
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1