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(also reviewed)
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I don't know of any reader who openly dislikes Elmore Leonard. The master of gangster novels is so compulsively readable and his obsession with finding new ways of telling the same story competes with Iron Maiden's who turned rewriting lyrics over the same guitar riff into a four decades career. It's become a cliché for reviewers to say that readable authors sound like Elmore Leonard. No one sounds like Leonard, until they do. San Francisco-based author Tom Pitts, who's prose used to suffer identity issues, knocked it out of the park with his latest release KNUCKLEBALL, a short an everybody's novella where everybody's kind of an asshole. I know, that speaks the language of love to me, right? There's more to it, don't worry. I have to say, it's the first Tom Pitts book I'm actually enthusiastic about.
The San Francisco Giants are the darlings of their city. People in the Mission District follow the three time world series champion with religious fervor. When a cop gets shot in the face multiple times by a hoodlum who looks like the devil late during the first game of a three game series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the district is turned upside down. People feel like they've been taken hostage by the tragedy and ongoing investigation. Oscar Flores, a neighborhood teenager enamored with baseball, sure hopes this madness stops. Officer Vince Alvarez hopes he could turn back the clock, so that he could react differently the day his annoying beat partner lost his face to a homicidal street thug. It's too late for wishes, though.
What's so lively about the two protagonists of KNUCKLEBALL is that their desires are chivalrous, but their actions say otherwise. Tom Pitts doesn't take them all that seriously, though and it's really what makes the novella fun and so reminiscent of what Elmore Leonard used to do. The gap between who people think they are and who they really are often is what makes them interesting and Pitts gets that. KNUCKLEBALL is a novella about people and how murder can turn their lives upside down and reshape their identities. It's a character-driven trope that offers endless possibilities. Personally, I prefer to read that way more than reading a bunch of angry, foul-mouthed gangsters arguing over a botched drug deal. The concept of KNUCKLEBALL is not original at all, but the execution is. It's one of these novellas that don't surprise you, but fulfill your expectations anyway.
KNUCKLEBALL is the third Tom Pitts book I've read and I gotta say it's satisfying as hell to notice the tremendous improvement between each volumes. He's always written competent crime fiction, but long-time readers like me will feel that he's really developing his own thing based on strong characterization and a quirky, unique tone. My main complain is one of the characters eventually takes the backseat to the storytline, it didn't drag long enough to make it annoying. That's the beauty of how a novella operates. KNUCKLEBALL is short, yet clever, layered and patient. It doesn't feel short at all and most important, feels more satisfying than some full novels. It's a great book to read in one setting, whether you're having an afternoon off or you're taking a long time on the toilet. If you're looking to get into Tom Pitts, start here.