Description:
Although the primary roles in Robert Skinner's sixth crime novel, The Righteous Cut, all belong to men, it's the secondary female characters--good, bad, and indecent--that one remembers best from this tautly contrived saga of greed and retribution. On the eve of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, Wesley Farrell, a mixed-race nightclub owner and irregular sleuth, returns to New Orleans from Havana, only to find the city erupting in an apparent gangland coup. Flagrantly corrupt councilman Whitman Richards has already lost two top henchmen to murder, and his teenage daughter, Jessica, has been kidnapped. Believing he knows and can stop the old enemy directing these acts, Richards eschews police assistance. But his defiant wife, Georgia, turns to Farrell for help, having known him during his younger days as a "two-bit hood." Even Farrell, with his criminal contacts and the backing of his Irish police captain father, may not be able to rescue Jessica, prevent the slaying of a naive young witness to her abduction, and keep Richards breathing. Skinner's pre-war New Orleans is a piquant gumbo of whorehouses, jazz dives, and quotidian street violence, a place where "anything goes if you got the price of the ticket," and where the desperate acts of a kidnap victim or a hit man's sudden bout with his conscience seem only to be expected. The Righteous Cut is less bleakly consuming than an earlier Farrell outing, Blood to Drink, and its final resolution exalts convenience over credibility, yet the balance of human emotions against action here is remarkably satisfying. --J. Kingston Pierce
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