Leading Lady

by Gould, Heywood, Heywood Gould, Alex Brown

On a grey winter's day in New York, the lives of a group of strangers collide when high-class burglar Jerry Lang breaks out of jail, intent on avenging the murder of Gloria Pavlich, his partner and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594146489
• ISBN13: 9781594146480
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Five Star (ME)
• Length: 299 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A Thrill Ride You Wont Forget

As many readers know, I love a good thriller/mystery. Some are your conspiracy, big government types where the main character is a rogue agent trying to save themselves and the world. Others involve a mystery and the secret workings of unseen forces. However, it is really hard to beat the old fashioned thriller involving the mafia, troubled thieves, their lovers, and the secret service. When an author is able to bring all of these diverse, and nefarious characters into one amazing story, then I find it hard to put the book down. I'd rather stay home and lose myself in the unraveling mystery then go out for drinks with friends. As my friends can attest (by my absence), I've recently had the privilege to read just such a mystery. The most recent book by seasoned author Heywood Gould - Leading Lady - was a thriller times ten. The story involves the life of Jerry Lang, a regular guy that has turned to grifting (high class thievery). Working with his "leading lady" Gloria, they are one job away from retirement. With an eye on making a nice sum by stealing a "Self Portrait" by the Russian master painter Isaac Levitan, Jerry and Gloria find themselves in the center of a set up. What kind of set up is part of the mystery and thrill of the story. Ending up in jail for shooting a cop during the grift, Lang fights off several assassination attempts and begins to understand that his set up was not just the design of the police. Rather, he suspects the guy who gave him the job, Hanif. As Lang escapes from jail and begins to hunt down the people who blew his cover, a deeper mystery unfolds. How did the cops know where he was going to make the drop? Who informed them? And what happened to his leading lady Gloria? Was she killed as Lang assumes? The twists and turns that Leading Lady takes were intricate and complex. I read a lot, and usually can tell before hand what is going to happen. Not here. Up until the final moment I kept thinking that Hanif and his boss Tony Rasso were behind it. I didn't quite know how the ex-Russian secret agent fit in, nor the cops, but I figured it would be explained at the end. And boy was it, just not how I had thought. Leading Lady is an action packed, suspense thriller of the top caliber. If you think you know thrillers, and you like a complex story with a set of characters that stepped off of the Godfather movie set, then I would highly recommend Leading Lady. You will not be disappointed. +++++++++++++++++++++ Great New Books That Are A Must Read http://newgreatbooks.blogspot.com

It's like watching a Nascar event. Fast, dangerous, sexy. By Tony Scaduto

So here comes Heywood Gould again with another exciting tale. Gould, author of "Fort Apache, The Bronx," "Boys From Brazil" and other novels and screenplays, now gives us a super-charged story full of bad guys, a lot badder guys (among them rogue Feds, Russian and Albanian mobsters and locally-grown mafiosi) and a not-that-bad bad guy you can come to love and root for. Jerry Lang, by name. Lang, a thief practically from when he was a toddler, usually steals on demand. That is, he gets an assignment from a fence, mentor, whatever, to rip off a bit of property that someone else covets. This time it's a valuable piece of art, and he and his "leading lady" - Gloria, a very lovely, erotic head-turner whose role is to distract any man who might get in Jerry's way - head off to work. But things go wrong and Gloria vanishes and most certainly has ended up buried in the Bronx or some other godawful place and Jerry himself almost gets the final push to Hell but ends up in jail for a couple of years. (I'm really not giving much away: Gloria is disposed of in the first few pages.) From this point on Jerry lives with one major motivation. Revenge. Revenge drives the tale, and it's like watching a Nascar event. Fast, dangerous, sexy. And this is a pretty sexy book. Chapter One introduces us to Jerry's leading lady with a warm, tender and glowing post-coital description of her body, her near-perfect bone structure and just how Jerry feels about her: He truly loves her. It's afternoon, with the theft of the artwork planned for that night, and they've made love mostly because if the caper turns bad he wants his last memories to be of Gloria's essence. The dialogue is smart and droll; nothing flashy, but it will instantly hook you. Four pages in, just after Jerry and Gloria have made love, he explains the final details of their upcoming heist that he's been asked to pull off by a fence/scammer/rotter from whom he's long taken assignments. He discusses their place in the pecking order of who gets paid how much and why the top guy gets the most and why Jerry and Gloria, the "heavy lifters," get the least. "How do we go up to the next level?" Gloria asks. Jerry's wry response: "Get different parents." A touch fatalistic, and yes, Jerry grew up in a rough and tumble crummy neighborhood, but he makes no excuses and no apologies. Jerry is not exactly a good guy but the guys he is up against are so much worse. Of course, the score goes south and the rest of this post-modern noir detective novel is a cat and mouse tale of revenge and counter-revenge peopled by some pretty interesting characters. Gould is able to make a character come alive with just a few words. For example, his description of a big, beefy bouncer: "He had three chins, only two of them shaved." The cast of characters include a sly and crafty mafia boss surrounded by mostly loyal but dim goons and a coked-up lieutenant impatient to step up and depose the boss so he can sit at a table in an Italia

exhilarating crime caper

Thieves Jerry Lang and Gloria Pavlich are doing one last caper before retiring. They are to steal a five million dollar painting "Self Portrait" by Isaac Leviathan from a private collector; then they will give it to their fence Albanian expatriate Hanif "Mittens" Gallega who will sell it. They succeed in taking the painting, but when they get to their hotel, thugs greet them. In the melee that follows, Jerry shoots one of his assailants, but watches his beloved leading lady vanish. He later learns he killed a cop and is convicted of such. In prison, Jerry escapes four assassination attempts. His last one has him sharing a hospital room with a corpse that he uses to escape his incarceration. He is coming for Hanif while remaining unaware someone has assigned Delta Force Domestic Major Cliff Hartung to insure he does not get close to one of his agency's "toys". At the Casbah, Jerry meets college student dancer Letitia Hudson, who gets caught in the middle of a local war. This exhilarating crime caper is not for the cozy crowd as Jerry, feeling guilt for accepting one last job over Gloria's objection, proves quite efficient in dispatching enemies in a violent manner. The story line is fast-paced as Letitia becomes Jerry's new LEADING LADY and Hanif his crash dummy. Although how Hartung and his two deadly soldiers fit into the plot comes very late with quite a revelation, readers will appreciate Heywood Gould's wild Noir. Harriet Klausner