Wallace Stroby’s latest novel, Cold Shot to the Heart
, is part gangster movie, part atmospheric thriller. At the centre of the story is Crissa Stone, a half-Mary, half-Magdalene like figure, specializing in armed robbery and sometimes motherhood. When Crissa gets involved with a crew looking to take-off a high end card game in a glitzy, Miami beach-front hotel, the caper’s fallout provides the novel’s anecdotal burst.
Stroby writes a compulsive prose, peppered with short, staccato sentences. He relishes in describing physical fact: “Reynoldo, the doorman, came out to greet her. She paid the driver cash, tipped him twenty dollars, heard the trunk click open.” Writing like this is about momentum and information; the writing doesn’t absorb emotion; rather, in a kind of tricked out Cormac McCarthy fashion, it absorbs the little processes of the physical world. “She steadied the .38 in her right hand, gripped the pen-light with her left, wrists crossed, thumb on the button. Her finger tightened on the trigger. No time to cock it. To fire, she’d have to take the long double action pull, hope she was quick enough.”
At core, Cold Shot to the Heart is a novel about disappointment; the disappointment and fatigue underpinning any criminal lifestyle. What Stroby does best is articulate that disappointment by describing the constant uncertainty of crime, the toll of living on adrenaline 24/7 – and, ultimately, the frustrations of choosing a world, and a profession, of ever decreasing options: “It had become a pattern. A few months of normalcy, relaxation. Then the money at hand would start to run low around the same time she began to get bored. She’d wait for word, a call from Kansas City or St. Louis or Phoenix or a dozen other cities. She’d hear what they had to say. Then, more often than not, she’d be working again – and the cycle would start over. It didn’t make for much of a future, she knew. But now it was the only life she could stand to live.”
Cold Shot to the Heart is a short and compelling read, easily devoured in one sitting. It’s a ferocious narrative, hopefully furthering Wallace Stroby’s position as a writer of note in the world of crime fiction.
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