Description

Savage Night by Jim Thompson

Paperback – Mulholland Books – 2014 – 229

Jake Winroy had no looks, no education, and little else before he worked his way to the top of a million-dollar-a-month horse-betting ring. But after the state latches on to his game, the feds take a bite, and the legal fees eat away at the rest, all Jake’s got left is the bottle and a beautiful wife whose every world is ugly.

Jake is to be the top witness in a major case against organized crime–if he hasn’t already kicked the bucket before the trial has its day in court. An enigmatic Mafioso known only as The Man has a plan to make dead certain Jake never gets the chance to testify.

The Man hires Charlie “Little” Bigger, barely five feet tall, to inflitrate Jake’s residence as a tenant and murder him in cold blood. To Little, it seems like the easiest job on earth. Until he lays eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Fay and the Winroy’s young housemaid, Ruth, a woman as sensual as she is vulnerable. Savage Night is Jim Thompson at his most unpredictable and deeply suspenseful, in a claustrophopic thriller of one man’s fractured mind.