Smoke

★★★★★ "I loved this book! Why? Because Bruce Rubenstein got it. He got it! He got the voice and he held it, faultlessly. He got the vocabulary of the time, the place, the story, the characters." ★★★★★        HannaJeane (Amazon review)★★★★★ "I have to say I could not get Mike Hammer out of my mind during this book. PI Martin McDonough is written with some similarities to Mike. This is a fast read and I liked it very much." ★★★★★       Dorothy "DottieH", Jersey City (Amazon review)★★★★★ "If you like Humphrey Bogart, murder mysteries, snappy dialogue and great characters, you will love this book." ★★★★★       BEC (Amazon review) It's 1934, the depth of the Great Depression, but business is good for Martin McDonough, a private eye who is in the right place at the right time. There are plenty of unsolved murders in St. Paul, a city with such a corrupt police force that it has become a haven for trigger-happy gangsters. McDonough is used to solving crimes the easy way, by persuading his copper pals to give him the low down. But when a newspaperman becomes the victim of a gang hit, and his pretty widow wants to know why, things get complicated. McDonough might end up dead, or worse yet, married. ★★★★★ "Smoke is set in 1934, the year Samuel Dashiell Hammett wrote his final novel, "The Thin Man." Why make this connection? Well...Hammett is hard-boiled detective fiction, and gumshoe Martin McDonough IS St. Paul's version of Sam Spade. Even without the cameos by John Dillinger, Bugsy Siegel, and Baby Face Nelson, there is such attention to detail and such authenticity -- albeit politically and socially incorrect -- to Rubenstein's tale that I couldn't put it down and pushed straight through to the nd." ★★★★★       Charles Locks       Award-winning author of Low Jinks on the High Seas