Wager Smart

by Tom Farrell

Overview

In Wager Smart, Eddie and Uncle Mike take on a cold case for Arlene Adams, the wealthy widow of a notorious hitman. The case leads Eddie and his uncle to Vegas, where they meet the hitman's old partner, the Deacon, a legend in the mob. The cold case quickly spirals into an investigation of a current murder that requires the men to make a dangerous deal with the mob. Eddie's old girlfriend, a poker pro and sports betting insider, gives Eddie and his uncle an edge, but could also lure Eddie back into his old Vegas gambling habits. Eddie and his uncle must walk a fine line between the high rollers, mob business interests, competing crime syndicates and the police, to get justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781736593257
Publisher:	Rail Bird Publishing LLC
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Series:	An Eddie O'Connell Mystery Thriller , #3
Pages:	346
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Tom Farrell has worked as a golf course starter, a chemist and clerked at City Hall in Chicago while attending law school. His novel, Wager Tough, was selected by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Best Books of 2021 Indie. He has served as Vice President of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, a nonprofit corporation, and was a 2021 finalist for Independent Writer of the Year. Now retired from practicing law, when he's not writing he can be found on the golf course or at a local jazz club. Visit him at www.tomfarrellbooks.com

Editorial Reviews

★ 2023-09-13
A former gambler teams up with a former police detective to investigate the fate of a missing mob enforcer in Farrell’s mystery novel.

Arlene Adams, the owner of Chicago’s Thornton Racetrack, calls in private investigator and sports gambler Eddie O’Connell and his uncle, Mike, a retired police detective. Arlene thinks the duo might be perfectly placed to help with a peculiar problem: She’s been having bad dreams about the missing love of her life (and, unbeknownst to her, a professional mob hit man), Porter “the Pastor” Pearson, in which he seems to repeatedly ask her (his words are unclear), “Why aren’t you looking for me, Arlene?” Eddie is skeptical at first, but Arlene has been contacted by Pearson’s old fellow hitman, the Deacon, and Uncle Mike is enticed by all the cold cases he could help to close. Meeting with the Deacon sets in motion a twisty plot involving said cold cases, an unexpected new murder, and the lurking dangers of the high-rolling world of gambling and its connections to crime. With the help of Eddie’s former girlfriend, Nicole, now a famous professional poker player in Las Vegas, Eddie and Mike soon make connections to the power structure undergirding the world of shady finance, where they meet “hedge fund celebrity” Eliot Scullion. Conducting a tense investigation in which any one of their new acquaintances could be a murderer, Eddie and Uncle Mike must be careful not to become victims themselves.

Much like the previous outings in this series, Farrell’s foray into the interconnected worlds of gambling and organized crime yields a story full of narrative crackle and well-drawn characters, here enhanced by the added element of Wall Street “masters of the universe” (plus a few criminal Russians as a bonus). The author’s skill at pacing is superb, without any lulls or dead-end subplots, and his ear for characterization is so keen that huge swaths of the book are carried by dialogue alone. Eddie and Uncle Mike naturally occupy the spotlight, but secondary characters like Nicole (and even Arlene Adams) are handled with textured believability (including the Deacon, for whom readers will feel sympathy but no affection). The interplay between Uncle Mike’s world of law enforcement and the series’ recurring mob family, the Burrascanos, is handled with pleasing nuance, especially in this latest installment, in which Uncle Mike’s long and ethically spotty history with both the Deacon and one of his victims is gradually laid bare to Eddie. These revelations reopen Eddie’s oldest and most painful family wounds, and Farrell steadfastly resists the temptation to sink into cheap melodrama. The book takes some confident and intensely satisfying swings at maturing Eddie without fundamentally altering the great chemistry between the two heroes, and the element of personal redemption (working in the bright lights of Vegas, Eddie feels anew the pull of the gambling world he’s left behind for respectability) adds some light to the plot’s many dark elements. As with the earlier books in this series, this latest will leave readers eager for another outing.

A smart, gripping crime thriller about the corrosive price of vengeance.

Kirkus Reviews