Every Man a Menace E-Book

Patrick Hoffman

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Patrick Hoffman burst onto the crime fiction scene with The White Van, a captivating thriller set in the back streets of San Francisco, which was named a Wall Street Journal best mystery of the year and was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. Hoffman returns with Every Man a Menace, the inside story of an increasingly ruthless ecstasy-smuggling ring. San Francisco is about to receive the biggest delivery of MDMA to hit the West Coast in years. Raymond Gaspar, just out of prison, is sent to the city by his boss - still locked up on the inside - to check in on the increasingly erratic dealer expected to take care of distribution. In Miami, meanwhile, the man responsible for shipping the drugs from Southeast Asia to the Bay Area has just met the girl of his dreams - a woman who can't seem to keep her story straight. And thousands of miles away, in Bangkok, someone farther up the supply chain, a former conscript of the Israeli army, is about to make a phonecall that will put all their lives at risk. Stretching from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia to the Golden Gate of San Francisco, Every Man a Menace offers an unflinching account of the making, moving and selling of the drug known as Molly - pure happiness sold by the brick, brought to market by bloodshed and betrayal.

Leseprobe

Praise for Patrick Hoffman

‘My favourite debut of 2015 so far . . . His careful, pared-down prose is a delight . . . The White Van is a caperish delight, channelling Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake to exhilarating and unexpected effect.’

Guardian

‘Filled with epic twists and savage turns, the pace is relentless, and Hoffman's drive sets fire to the pages as he crawls across the sinister black underbelly of the Californian dream . . . ­Exhilarating and powerful.’

Daily Mail on The White Van

‘A nifty bit of noir set in the mean streets of San Francisco . . . a juicily dark thriller.’

Weekend Sport on The White Van

‘The White Van, with its quick and scary turns, provides a hell of a ride; the action never stops – even after the final page.’

Wall Street Journal

‘Exhilarating crime debut . . . Hoffman's crime plot doesn't just thicken, it boils with surprise after surprise and suspense as tight as a noose.’

San Francisco Chronicle on The White Van

‘Patrick Hoffman's second novel . . . about the tangled web of criminal drug trafficking enterprises behind a single murder, crackles with authenticity’

San Francisco Magazine

‘Astonishing . . . a mind-bending, attention-demanding ­narrative as full of shocks and surprises as an LSD party’

Wall Street Journal

‘With its hard-boiled shenanigans and soft-minded crooks, ­Hoffman's follow-up to The White Van is another strong and original addition to the crime fiction genre.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘Hoffman has crafted a powerful, albeit bleak, crime novel.’

Booklist

EVERY MAN A MENACE

Also by Patrick Hoffman

The White Van

EVERY MANA MENACE

Patrick Hoffman

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright ©Patrick Hoffman, 2016

The moral right of Patrick Hoffman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, entities or persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 534 0

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 955 3

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

For Kathy Coyne

Part I

Getting out of prison is like having a rotten tooth pulled from your mouth: it feels good to have it gone, but it’s hard not to keep touching at that hole. Raymond Gaspar served four years this time. He served them at a place in Tracy called the Deuel Vocational Institution, DVI. The only vocation he learned was making sure the drugs kept moving. By the time he was done, he’d become something like a football coach. He told the players where to stand, what to do. He wasn’t the head coach. That would be his boss, a man named Arthur.

Raymond fell in with Arthur because one of his uncles used to associate with him. As soon as Raymond got bounced from San Quentin up to DVI, his uncle told him to find a man named Arthur. Don’t worry, he said. There’ll only be one Arthur on the yard. That ended up being true. Arthur smiled big when he heard who Raymond was.

It turned out Arthur was a good man to know at DVI. He was big business, and not just there either; he kept a low profile, but his fingers stretched well beyond the yard. He associated as white, but he dealt with blacks and Latins, too; as far as Raymond knew, Arthur was the only man in the California Department of Corrections who could make a call to the Black Guerrila Family or the Aryan Brotherhood and get action from either group. That’s how he was.

Raymond had been locked up for trying to sell a stolen boat to a man in San Francisco. He had walked right into a police investigation that didn’t have anything to do with him. It was simple bad luck. They wrapped him up outside the garage on Sixth Street. When the cops searched his car they found an ounce of crystal meth. It was a bad day. They had him on tape talking about the boat, which led them to the boat itself, back in a garage in Richmond, and they had the drugs. Two months later, his public defender, a good lawyer, lost a motion to suppress at the preliminary hearing, and Raymond was forced to take a deal: four years.

Arthur must’ve thought that stolen boat made Raymond something of a businessman. He kept him off the front lines, didn’t use him as muscle, and right off the bat made him a supervisor. It was a fine thing to be doing: make the rounds, see where things were with the supply, let Arthur know that everything was good. He didn’t have to touch the dope, and he didn’t have to play rough either.

Raymond swore he saw a shine in Arthur’s eyes when he reminded him that his release date was approaching. It was uncharacteristic. “I got a little situation you could help me with,” the older man said. They were sitting near the handball courts in the south yard. A few of Arthur’s men sat near them. Arthur was a big man, with a big head and big shoulders; he sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees. In his country accent—he’d been raised on a horse farm in western Colorado—he explained that he had a little side thing going in San Francisco.