Citizen Vince: A Novel

It’s the fall of 1980, the last week before the presidential election that pits the downtrodden Jimmy Carter against the suspiciously sunny Ronald Reagan. In a seedy suburban house in Spokane, a small-time crook formerly from New York, Vince Camden, pockets his weekly allotment of stolen credit cards and heads off to his witness-protection job at a donut shop. A the shop he takes a shine to a regular named Kelly, who works for a local politician. Somehow he finds himself and the politician in a parking lot at three in the morning, giving the slip to a couple of menacing thugs. And then he crosses the path of a young detective—and discovers his credit-scam partner, lying dead in his passport-photo office with a Cheerio-size bullet-hole in his head. No one writing crime novels today tells a story or sketches a character with more freshness or elan than Jess Walter. Citizen Vince is his funniest and grittiest book yet.