Tom Epperson's, first novel, a retro look back at Los Angeles in the dirty thirties entitled The Kind One, is a direct hit out of the ballpark, and how! If you like your crime fiction darkly atmospheric this will prove an interesting and entertaining ride. Beautiful gangster molls, cruel, sadistic hoods, golden sunsets, quirky neighbours sharing a bungalow-court apartment building and references to period film stars all add up to page turning excitement.
The main character, Danny Landon is struggles to piece together a past that only comes to him through dream fragments. Badly beaten during a vicious attack, he is nursed back to health at the expense of mobster Bud Seitz and transported from the east coast to Los Angeles. Seitz takes Landon under his protective wing, but the pieces of the puzzle don't seem to fall together in a way that makes any sense until a fellow gang member spills the beans. Danny has some big choices to make and the climax to the story makes for thrilling reading.
This reviewer found a reference to Mae West particularly well painted in word pictures, perfectly illustrating Epperson's snappy way with dialogue, which made reading this novel so much fun.
"So I'm living downtown near Pershing Square, and I'm taking a trolley car out to the beach, and there's this guy in a bowtie looking at me. I think he's trying to pick me up, and I'm ignoring him, then he says, Mae West has only got one thing that you don't have. An agent. And I says, are you an agent, and he says yeah. And I says how do you know that I don't have an agent, and he says if you had an agent you wouldn't be riding in some dumpy trolley car. And I says you're riding in a trolley car, who kinda lousy agent does that make you, and he says it makes me a very good agent, 'cause I just discovered the next Mae West."
If this sophomore effort is any indication, Epperson has earned a place for himself on the crime fiction bookshelf.
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