A Fistful of Rain - Hardcover

Rucka, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 055380135X ISBN 13: 9780553801354

Publisher: Bantam, 2003

Synopsis

Greg Rucka has earned the kind of reputation that all thriller writers envy: his crime fiction grabs readers by the throat and compels them to read as if their own lives were at stake. Now, in an electrifying departure, Rucka creates a new kind of hero: a damaged young woman in free fall who’s not only in danger--but dangerous.

A Fistful of Rain

Mim Bracca is riding the fast lane straight off the end of the world. Now she’s coming home without a job, without a future, and without a prayer--and only one last chance to get her feet under her, or go down forever. But home has its own terrors, including a past Mim has done everything possible to leave behind.

Now that past is coming back with the shocking speed and deadly intent of a sniper’s bullet, aimed to destroy her once and for all. When Mim suffers her first blackout, waking up dazed and bloodied, she’s certain she’s hit rock bottom.

She’s wrong. She’s only just begun to fall.

The photos are invasive, obscene, and all over the Internet for anyone to see. How they got there, where and when they were shot, and by whom, Mim has no idea. And before the investigation into the matter even begins, a brutal murder makes it clear that whatever Mim thinks her life has been up to now, she’s about to learn it’s all a lie.

The kind of lie that will kill.

Written with stunning originality, A Fistful of Rain crosses the line separating the guilty from the innocent as it takes us on a breakneck ride of deceit and double cross and--quite possibly--the last twenty-four hours in Mim Bracca’s stormy life.

About this title

Review:

Miriam "Mim" Bracca's career seems to be unraveling--almost as fast as her life. After hitting the bottle too hard while on tour with her rock band, Tailhook, the 26-year-old guitarist is sent home to Portland, Oregon, where she's expected to get some rest and get her head back in the music game. But as Greg Rucka makes clear in A Fistful of Rain, nothing remotely close to relaxation is in Mim's immediate future.

Even before she can get through the front door of her house, Mim is kidnapped at gunpoint, forced into a truck and told to strip, then driven around for a while before being dumped back where she started, bewildered but unmolested. Shortly thereafter, nude photos of her turn up on the Internet, and her drug-dealing brother, Mikel--whom Mim fears helped make this pornography possible--is shot to death. The musician is quick to blame Mikel's murder on their father, Tommy, who's just won release after spending 15 years in prison for killing Mim's mom; yet she concedes that such premeditated violence is probably beyond him. "He wasn't a planner," Mim says of the hated Tommy. "He was like me; life happened to us, we didn't do things to life." But then, who else would want to hasten the destruction this woman has already been bringing on herself? To find out, the petite and pissed-off Mim will have to elude police, confront a blackmailer in Portland's "shanghai tunnels," and stay sober long enough to stay alive.

Rucka brings the same cinematic storytelling, sharp plot twists, and quirky characterizations to A Fistful of Rain that have won his Atticus Kodiak novels praise. His portrayal of Mim Bracca is thoughtfully nuanced, her credibility as a heroine drawn from her weaknesses, rather than cobbled together from unexpected strengths. Too bad he wasn't as conscientious with other players here, such as Tailhook diva Vanessa Parada, who's given barely enough dimension to anchor her competitive claws; or Detective Tracy Hoffman, whose lesbian attraction to Mim is more the product of male fantasy than a significant addition to this yarn. Although readers can solve many of Rucka's puzzles before Mim does, the fraught relationship between this guitarist and her dad, as well as a turnaround ending, prevent A Fistful of Rain from ever seeming dry. --J. Kingston Pierce

From the Back Cover:

"Rucka, author of five other thrillers, knows how to create and sustain suspense."
--Publisher's Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 055380135X
• ISBN 13: 9780553801354
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320