Nobody's Angel (Hard Case Crime) - Softcover

Clark, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857683500 ISBN 13: 9780857683502

Publisher: Hard Case Crime, 2011

Synopsis

TWO KILLERS STALK THE STREETS OF CHICAGO – CAN ONE TAXI DRIVER CORNER THEM BOTH?

Eddie Miles is one of a dying breed: a Windy City hack who knows every street and back alley of his beloved city and takes its recent descent into violence personally. But what can one driver do about a killer targeting streetwalkers or another terrorizing cabbies? Precious little – until the night he witnesses one of them in action...

About this title

About the Author

Jack Clark is an award winning journalist who has been writing for the Chicago Reader since 1975. He is the winner of the Chicago Newspaper Guild's Page One Award for feature writing.
His first novel, "Westerfield's Chain," featuring Chicago Private detective Nick Acropolis, was a finalist for the Shamus Award for best first private eye novel. It's been joined by two other Acropolis novels: "Highway Side" and "Dancing on Graves."
He is also author of the oral history "On the Home Front," with his mother Mary Jo Clark. It was published by Plume in 2002.
Jack was a long-haul furniture mover for Allied Van Lines for many years. He's also been driving a taxi on and off for the last 35 years. He has lived in Chicago his entire life.

Review

No matter what you might expect from a novel by a cabdriver -- "Nobody's Angel" is a gem. For what it is, it's just about perfect. I won't urge would-be novelists to forsake their writing classes and become hackers, but they would do well to read Clark's story, which doesn't contain a wasted word or a false note...Its real beauty lies in [cabbie] Eddie [Miles] bittersweet existence and the special romance and danger of the cabdriver's life -- lives we often glimpse but rarely give a second thought.--Washington Post

Nobody's Angel has the wry humor and engaging characters typical of the best of the hard-boiled genre, but Clark's portrait of Chicago in the 1990s, with its vanishing factories and jobs, its lethal public housing projects, its teenage hookers climbing into vans on North Avenue, is what gives it legs. Sure there are a couple murderers on the loose, but the larger violence is coming from systemic forces wreaking havoc in a place that, maybe, used to be better.--Chicago Reader

Eddie Miles is a regular guy with a sad past and a big heart and a hard boiled city attitude. He's like you and me, the sort of protagonist I most like reading about in so-called crime fiction.
Jack Clark first self-published "Nobody's Angel" and sold it out of his cab. Eventually the excellent crime fiction publishers, Hard Case Crime, republished the book under their imprint--an inspiring story for everyday Joes and Josephines who write in their spare time. Do yourself a favor and flag it down.--Uncorrected Proof

"The anecdotal structure pulls you along at just the right pace and the economics of his story telling are commendable. There's a world of intriguing and memorable detail expertly packed into two-hundred pages and just the right amount of heartache. The book's close features one of the best final lines of any book I've ever read. Please don't pick it up and read that last page first, it's so worth getting there naturally." --Barnes & Noble Ransom Notes

Edition details

• Publisher: Hard Case Crime
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0857683500
• ISBN 13: 9780857683502
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224