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Having at least temporarily abandoned both his real name and his gritty, socially conscious series about LA private eye Aaron Gunner (All the Lucky Ones Are Dead), Gar Anthony Haywood--writing as "Ray Shannon"--delivers in Firecracker an animated, rapid-fire thriller about professional sports, greed, and the sometimes outrageous consequences of clashing egos.
Reece Germaine is a gutsy, mid-30s PR exec from Los Angeles who, even in her eighth month of pregnancy, is fetching enough to "stop traffic on the last lap of a NASCAR race." Aggravated by her failure to wrest support money from her baby's father, Dallas Cowboys star Raygene ("Gene the Dream") Price--"the best tight end in football, bar none"--Reece hopes instead for a compensatory payoff from the Super Bowl betting slip that Raygene, flaunting his success and foolishly ignoring league regulations, had given her during their all-too-brief fling. If the "lousiest team in football," the Arizona Cardinals, pulls off the impossible by winning the latest Super Bowl, that slip will be worth a cool $1.25 million. Unfortunately, Reece isn't the only one who knows this; so does Raygene--and he could sure use that dough himself. Boyishly naïve, he recently lost most of his fortune on imprudent real-estate schemes, yet he's being blackmailed by a childhood chum, drug dealer Thomas "Trip" Stiles (a "deeply disturbed white man who suffers the delusion he's black"), who is threatening to frame Raygene for murder, unless the footballer can come up with $200,000. Fast.
Like Man Eater, Haywood/Shannon's first standalone, Firecracker propels an expansive cast of misfits and malefactors toward an inevitable (and inevitably comic) collision of interests. The results play out in Las Vegas, where Reece has gone to await the Super Bowl's conclusion, pursued by Raygene and the thuggish Trip--both determined to relieve her of that wager receipt--as well as by PI Aeneas Charles, who's working undercover as Gene the Dream's ghost writer, while he protects the star player's interests and develops his own interest in the soon-to-deliver Reece. Despite it's easy comparisons to the works of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, and its surprisingly flaccid subplot about a vengeful cop-turned-"casino security flak," Firecracker comes off with a bang. --J. Kingston Pierce
From Publishers Weekly
In Shannon's second stand-alone thriller (after 2003's Man Eater), a tough PR exec and a hapless football pro face off over an unborn child and a betting slip that might be worth seven figures-and that's before things start to get complicated. Raygene Price, "a tight end out of Florida State... blessed with soft hands, 4.9 speed, and the body of a Greek god," signed with the Dallas Cowboys for a chunk of change, much of which he promptly lost on failed real estate schemes. Raygene is equally careless about birth control; he's impregnated several women who have later made financial demands. One of them, at least, is no ordinary starstruck bimbo: Reece (short for Clarice) Germaine, a smart, tough "major player" in entertainment public relations, decides to have Price's baby and turns up her nose at the payoff suggested by Raygene's mother, his new business manager. She's got a fallback: the Super Bowl betting slip that Raygene ("Gene the Dream") bought in serious violation of league rules and gave to Reece as a seduction gambit. Other players want pieces of Raygene's dwindling funds, especially a really nasty (and somewhat unbelievable) childhood friend, a white drug dealer named Trip Stiles "who suffers the delusion he's black." Everything comes to a head in Las Vegas on Super Bowl Sunday, and there's loads of action and double-crossing. The problem is that the center of it all, Raygene, is a very dim bulb, and not even a very likable one. But the pace is fast and the plot suitably outrageous. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Gar Anthony Haywood tried a new name and a new approach with Man Eater [BKL Ja 1&15 03], a terrific tale of Hollywood Darwinism that had wide mainstream appeal. He works a similar vein here. Reece Germaine is a tough PR agent, pregnant from a weekend fling, battling football star Raygene Price for child support. But Raygene needs money himself--he's being blackmailed by a former buddy, a "wannabe-black white boy" and genuine psycho. The maguffin is a betting slip Reece holds, a wager financed by Raygene that will pay $1.25 million if the long-shot team can win one more game--the Super Bowl. They converge on Las Vegas to fight for the ticket, joined by battling bodyguards and Aeneas Charles, a private investigator hired by Raygene's agent to keep the footballer out of trouble. While the multicar pileup the author engineers for the ending isn't completely convincing, it's still a pleasure to see him give professional sports the same roughing up he gave Hollywood. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Chicago Sun-Times
[A] witty romp of a thriller.
Robert Ferrigno
Full of dangerous badasses [and] intricate plot twists.
San Diego Union-Tribune
It's impossible to read this noir thriller without Elmore Leonard coming to mind.
Book Description
A beautiful and resourceful pregnant woman only weeks from her due date...the charming but disingenuous Dallas Cowboy who fathered her baby...a sadistic man with delusions of a new life...and a Super Bowl betting slip worth a potential $1.25 million all come together in a rollercoaster ride of dark humor and suspense on the Las Vegas strip.
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