Barbed-Wire Kiss »

Wallace Stroby is an editor for the New Jersey Star Ledger and lives in New Jersey. This is his first novel.

An Ex-Cop, A Mobster, A Beautiful Woman...

Long Branch, Asbury Park, Ocean Grove. The Jersey Shore ain't what it used to be, but ex-state trooper Harry Rane still calls it home. After his wife's death, Harry got careless, got shot, and he left the force. He's a changed man, leads a quiet life, except when it comes to helping his friends...

Some Triangles Were Made To Be Broken...

Now an old buddy of Harry's wants a big favor. He owes $50,000 to a Jersey crime boss and needs Harry to get him more time to repay the loan. That sounds like a plan...except for the green-eyed, redheaded complication. The mobster's married to a gorgeous lady who once fell hard for Harry. And history is about to repeat itself.

By A Bullet.

Trying to help his friend pay off his debt but inexorably drawn to the girl, soon Harry is between a rock and a hard place. His chances of getting up and staying alive look to be about a million to one....

"Wallace Stroby writes descriptive prose as shiny and sharp as a surgical instrument."

-Chicago Tribune

"Original and exciting...Stroby's dazzling debut manages to wake us up like the slap of a wave on the New Jersey shore."

-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Publishers Weekly

Stroby's dazzling debut stars the Grieving Ex-Cop, adds the Old Girl Friend Now Married to a Mobster, stirs in A Little Favor to Help Out a Best Friend-and still manages to wake us up like the slap of a wave on the New Jersey shore. When his best boyhood buddy comes to former state trooper and widower Harry Rane with a problem involving an abortive drug deal and a nasty local mobster, Harry offers to act as an honest broker, but new problems quickly arise. The mobster has been married for the last three years to a woman who 19 years before was forced to leave town by her parents after getting pregnant by Harry. So the stage is set for lots of angst and melodrama-made not only bearable but actually fascinating, largely because Stroby has created several instantly credible characters and has made them walk over his familiar terrain as if they were the first people ever to have done so. It also helps that his many action scenes are original and exciting, and that anyone who's ever been to Asbury Park or taken the ferry from New Jersey to Delaware will feel right at home. (Feb. 28) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.