"Cold Shot to the Heart" by Wallace Stroby: Book Review

"Cold Shot to the Heart" by Wallace Stroby
Minotaur, 289 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


This stand-alone thriller staked on a robbery gone wrong at a high-rollers' poker game comes up all aces in every suit.

Crissa Stone, the somewhat unlikely yet perfectly amenable protagonist, has escaped a lousy childhood in small-town Texas and worked her way up as a "call-girl" for crime bosses across the country.

Her assignments-- she can "yea" or "nay" on any prospect-- generally involve a small team of others who are in the same racket. This far along, she is always familiar with at least one of her conspirators on any given assignment.

Once a robbery goes down, Crissa and her fellow criminals get the heck out of Dodge, as it were, putting multiple state lines behind them. They split the take, with ten percent back to their boss.

As the novel commences, Crissa is residing way uptown in New York City, near Columbia University, yet hoping to get out of the business and to assume the cloak and mantle of a respectable Connecticut suburbanite.

Perhaps then, she can receive visits from the daughter who doesn't know her, who was given up to a childless married cousin back in Texas.

Also at the top of her agenda: Greasing the wheels of justice (that is, the palms of politicians), also back in Texas, to spring her beloved mentor-in-crime on the earliest possible parole.

Therefore, Crissa needs more money than she can easily live on, getaway "stay-low" vacations included.

That's her principal reason for getting immersed in an assignment with which she's not completely comfortable.

The disastrous results entangle her in a web of intrigue involving some over-the-hill New Jersey hoods, ever nearer the grim reaping they have managed to avoid throughout their heyday.

Prominent in that scenario is Eddie Santiago, just released from serving a full term covering for some of those hoods, and ready to settle old scores, cash in as many chips as quickly as possible, and disappear into a well-heeled retirement.

Eddie soon cuts (literally, on several occasions) a wide swath through supposed friends, with Crissa (a stranger to Eddie) and her partners-in-crime settling into his crosshairs.

Thrillers don't come much leaner and juicier than this, much like the steaks on which Crissa prefers to dine.

Crissa's yearning for a settled life, along with her deep feelings for friends and family, supplies the humanity to the flip side of the coin that is the pure sociopath that Eddie has become.

Nevertheless, give Crissa ten more years in the business, plus five-to-ten in the big house, and see if she would avoid evolving into a female Eddie.

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