The Righteous Cut (Wesley Farrell Novels) - Softcover

Skinner, Robert

3.9

10 ratings by Goodreads

9781590580448: The Righteous Cut (Wesley Farrell Novels)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590580443 ISBN 13: 9781590580448

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, 2007

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December 1941: Jessica Richards, daughter of corrupt New Orleans councilman Whitman Richards, is the victim of a sensational daylight kidnapping. Richards is deliberately throwing the police off the case. Is it because the kidnapper is a familiar enemy, returned to settle an old score, or has Richards faked the kidnapping to further some aim of his own? The desperate mother turns to Wesley Farrell for help. Farrell, a Creole club owner passing for white, prowls the citys bars and streets, familiarizing himself with a growing list of Richards enemies while he tries to decide which of them might have the brains and guts to stage a coup against the corrupt councilman.

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Review:

Although the primary roles in Robert Skinner's sixth crime novel, The Righteous Cut, all belong to men, it's the secondary female characters--good, bad, and indecent--that one remembers best from this tautly contrived saga of greed and retribution. On the eve of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, Wesley Farrell, a mixed-race nightclub owner and irregular sleuth, returns to New Orleans from Havana, only to find the city erupting in an apparent gangland coup. Flagrantly corrupt councilman Whitman Richards has already lost two top henchmen to murder, and his teenage daughter, Jessica, has been kidnapped. Believing he knows and can stop the old enemy directing these acts, Richards eschews police assistance. But his defiant wife, Georgia, turns to Farrell for help, having known him during his younger days as a "two-bit hood." Even Farrell, with his criminal contacts and the backing of his Irish police captain father, may not be able to rescue Jessica, prevent the slaying of a naive young witness to her abduction, and keep Richards breathing.

Skinner's pre-war New Orleans is a piquant gumbo of whorehouses, jazz dives, and quotidian street violence, a place where "anything goes if you got the price of the ticket," and where the desperate acts of a kidnap victim or a hit man's sudden bout with his conscience seem only to be expected. The Righteous Cut is less bleakly consuming than an earlier Farrell outing, Blood to Drink, and its final resolution exalts convenience over credibility, yet the balance of human emotions against action here is remarkably satisfying. --J. Kingston Pierce

About the Author:

Robert Skinner has degrees in history (Old Dominion University) and library science (Indiana University) and studied creative writing at the University of New Orleans. He's widely known for his non-fiction writing on the career of African-American novelist Chester Himes and on the American hard-boiled crime story. He's the author of two previous Wesley Farrell novels, Skin Deep, Blood Red, (1997) andCat-Eyed Trouble (1998). He makes his home in New Orleans where he's University Librarian at Xavier University of Louisiana.

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