'Shooting Doctor Jack' is a stylish and powerful novel that combines the elegant economy of Elmore Leonard with the narrative fireworks of Richard Price.
Brooklyn's Troutman Street is where cars, junkies, and dreams go to die -- a one-way thoroughfare traveling from nowhere to nowhere. On this devastated stretch of urban purgatory, Stoney and "Fat Tommy Bagadonuts" run their junkyard/salvage business, pushing the boundaries of what's legal and all too often crossing over them. Tommy's the savvy and the charm of the operation; Stoney's the muscle. And Tuco's a kid from the neighborhood -- an illiterate genius apprenticing to two masters of the quick-money dodge.
But things change on a day when two corpses turn up on the junkyard lot -- and an accountant is brutally murdered in a seedy Bronx motel. Suddenly Tommy, Stoney, and Tuco are taking major heat from the cops, the feds, a local drug lord -- and from professionals for whom killing is both an art and a business. And it will take the biggest scam they've ever run to walk off Troutman Street alive.
