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Title details for The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips - Available

The Ice Harvest

#1 in series

by Scott Phillips
Grover Gardner
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

It’s Christmas Eve, 1979, in Wichita, and Charlie Arglist, a crooked lawyer and strip-club owner, is drunkenly making the rounds before he blows town for good. Getting progressively drunker and deeper in trouble, Charlie needs to drop off a photograph of a local official in a compromising position and steal some drug money. Before it’s all over, a lot of people are going to wind up dead.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Ice Harvest

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 22, 2005

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781481541848
      • File size: 130269 KB
      • Duration: 04:31:23

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Having spent Christmas Eve at the Golden Cage and the Tease-A-Rama, our drunken hero, Charlie Arglist, is driving a "borrowed" Mercedes with a trunk riddled with bullet holes. A business associate--inside the trunk--is praying noisily. "I want to talk to a priest," he says. Teetering between savage humor and just plain savagery, this noir novel requires a narrator who can stay on the wire. In the precise, yet liquid voice that has become a staple of the industry, Grover Gardner gives each vile act just the emphasis required for believability, but never tips over into bathos or comedy. Shifting easily between accents and genders, he's a full cast in miniature. Those not disgusted will be delighted. B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 2, 2000
      Everywhere you look, trashy people are doing trashy things in this darkly delicious debut comic thriller. Set in the middle of a Christmas Eve blizzard in 1979 Wichita, the novel opens with lawyer-turned-petty-mobster Charlie Arglist marking time before an important meeting with his shady partner, Vic Cavanaugh. After this meeting he plans to leave Wichita hurriedly with a load of cash and, presumably, the enmity of its rightful owner, Bill Gerard, the local head of a larger regional crime syndicate. Charlie and Vic run a string of strip bars around Wichita for Gerard, from which they have been skimming cash on the sly. But Charlie, who sets out to visit all the outposts in his "empire" one last time, lets a drunken spirit of Yuletide sentimentality (or maybe spite) trigger an unprecedented (and therefore highly visible) string of improvisations. He comps some of his dancers' shakedown money, causing a riot at a club; he unwisely lets his would-be girlfriend in on one of Gerard's blackmail scams. Then he and his ex-brother-in-law crash the Christmas gathering of their cumulative ex-family, setting off a whole new string of disasters. For Charlie there is only the imminent future of his escape with Gerard's money, and it isn't until he discovers a fresh corpse buried behind Vic's empty house that he realizes that his future isn't what it used to be. Newcomer Phillips's seedy characters are skillfully developed, particularly the semiremorseful Charlie. The frigid Midwestern setting is the perfect frame for Charlie's wretched situation; the time period emphasizes the low-level viciousness of Charlie's contemporaries, and Phillips wastes no time in piling up the bodies. Charlie's final confrontation with Gerard will likely leave readers nauseated with laughter--altogether not a bad way to debut in crime fiction. Agent, Nicole Aragi at Watkins-Loomis. Rights sold in the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain.

    • Library Journal

      February 1, 2005
      This "pitch-perfect foray into pulp fiction" (LJ 9/15/00) debuts on audio, with the inimitable Grover Gardner.

      Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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