Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

This is a raw, hard-edged, noirish novel, dark and violent. It's good, too, with a plot easy enough to follow without too much back-paging and a heroine who listens to Bach between gun battles and turns out to be surprisingly likable. Crissa Stone is a robber for hire, now employed by a mobster who wants her and two cronies to break into a Fort Lauderdale hotel and bust up a card game that has a million bucks on the table. The three miscreants decide to rappel down the side of the building. The scenes of preparation and execution are chilling. But the heist goes wrong. A man is killed because, we're told, one of the gunmen spooked. But maybe not. Could the caper be disguised murder for hire? Why else does Crissa suddenly find herself pursued by a reptile called Eddie the Saint? Their clashes are cinematic: hurtling cars and bloodstained snow. Stroby has been called a nascent Crumley or Pelecanos. He shares their sense that cynicism is the last pose left to a romantic.--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Crissa never wants to hurt people. All she wants is their money.Crissa Stone. Is that her real name? Hard to tell. She's also Roberta Summersfield and Linda Hendryx. She has credit cards serving a variety of names and accounts in multiple banks. Painstakingly, she's prepared herself to vanish at any given moment. She has to. She's a world-class thief. She's learned from the best, but even the best in this chancy vocation is liable to misstep, which is why Wayne Boudreaux, her mentor and lover, is in a Texas slammer with seven years still to serve. Too long, thinks Crissa; prison is murdering him. Wayne has a parole hearing coming up, but there are black marks on his prison record, problems that $250,000 spent cleverly might help erase. To Crissa, that means work she'd have ducked in different circumstances: the hijacking of a high-stakes poker game. There's a fatal shootingnot by Crissa, but that scarcely matters. Suddenly, she's on the run. Someone wants vengeance. Someone else wants the game's takings. Enter Eddie Santiago. He has another name, too. They call him Eddie the Saint, but he's the very devil.Another fast, taut winner from Stroby (Gone 'til November, 2010, etc.) As for Crissa, she may be crime fiction's best bad girl ever.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal
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Career criminal Crissa Stone and her partner team up to rob a card game where there is rumored to be a half million dollars in play. But when a player with connections to hitman Eddie the Saint is shot during the robbery, the odds turn against Crissa. -VERDICT Barry Award finalist Stroby's (Gone 'til November) latest hard-boiled novel is a compelling blend of greed, violence, and the need to survive that will appeal to noir aficionados. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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Stroby (The Barbed-Wire Kiss) pits a resourceful crook against a ruthless killer in this well-crafted crime novel. Crissa Stone carefully weighs risks and rewards and her criminal associates' skills before undertaking a caper. Ex-con Eddie Santiago (aka Eddie the Saint) will kill on principle or for a buck. After one of Stone's men kills Lou Letteri, whom they intended only to rob in a high-stakes Fort Lauderdale, Fla., card game, things go sour in a hurry. Lou was the son-in-law of a Jersey mobster, who hires Santiago to avenge the dead man. When Santiago finds a weak link and starts rolling up the chain leading to Stone, running may not be an option for her as the action builds to the inevitable and exciting showdown. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.