Just finished "Out West" last week. It seems fairly
hardboiled to me,
without any trace of detective-ness. Published in 1996, it's
the story
of a minor convict named Ben West, who heads from the East to
the West.
He's ending up in San Francisco as the night desk clerk at a
tenderloin
hotel. He meets a woman. The kind of hit it off. She has
recently moved
from LA where she thinks she's killed her ex-lover and his
latest
squeeze by blowing them up. The squeeze got it, the boyfriend
not, but
she doesn't know that. He shows up and tries to kill her.
West
intervenes and kills him. She confesses her involvement with
the
explosion and why they can't call the police. Now they must
deal with
the body, each other, and an odd pair of sisters from the
Kentucky or
Tennessee that they have each contacted separately and may or
may not
fit in to the plot.
Guess how it ends? Not with "...they lived happily ever
after."
--L
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