32. The White Van by Patrick Hoffman

I can't remember why I picked up this book.  I did have this link to an interview with him, but I have not actually read it yet.  It may have just been strongly recommended by somebody on the excellent Rara Avis mailing list. In any case, I bought it new from Dark Carnival.  Always happy to find an excuse to buy books from there.

The trade dressing is really not my thing, but the book itself was quite good. It starts out with a girl meeting a Russian businessman in a bar in the Tenderloin in San Francisco.  They get drunk together and he takes her back to his hotel room where things get weird. She is kept in the hotel, watched and doped up but not really harmed or specifically coerced at first.  From there, an urban crime story with global roots unfolds.  It's a pretty classic crime story, with characters separate and then converging into a climax of violence.  I found the prose tight and the story moved forward with momentum.  It has several interesting characters and you don't lose track of any of them or their names, which is not easy to do.  The backstory and the criminal operations all seemed were detailed and seemed realistic.  The local Bay Area dialogue sounded genuine to this old man's ears ("He was just sitting in that van with the engine on, right in the middle of the street, just hella lurkin").  I read it in a day.  This is pretty good stuff for modern day noir.  Recommended.