Synopsis:
By Best-selling author Eric Jerome Dickey is back with his seventh novel, Thieves' Paradise, in which a gaggle of new yet familiar characters traverse the emotionally and physically arid landscape of modern-day Los Angeles, struggling to make ends meet and survive in a city where dreams either come true or die hard.Dante, the novel's protagonist, didn't have it easy growing up. His mother was regularly beaten by his father, who openly kept a mistress on the side. After witnessing one particularly vicious episode of domestic abuse, Dante releases years of pent-up rage and attacks his father. As a result, at 15 he's sent away to juvenile hall and later a boys' home, where he discovers a latent talent for running scams.
By his early twenties he's no stranger to the streets, but he follows his urges to go legit, landing a position with a computer firm, a modest apartment and a car, which he affectionately calls Oscar. But when the dot com world turns into the dot bomb, Dante gets the ax. Soon he's facing a mountain of unpaid bills and imminent danger from Nazario, who Dante took for few hundred dollars and his wife's wedding ring in a game of pool at the Eight Ball Corner. Nazario wants the ring back, and is determined to retrieve it by any means necessary but Dante doesn't have it -- he pawned it to raise some much-needed cash.
Eventually, financial deliverance arrives in the form of Dante's old friend, Scamz, a charismatic smooth operator of the highest order -- brilliant, philosophical, erudite and very dangerous -- Dickey describes him as "a cross between Tupac and Plato." Scamz pulles Dante, against his better judgement, back into the criminal life -- if only for one last heist. Much action ensues, from a romantic fling with Pam, an actress and fellow grifter, to a combustible series of beat-downs administered by the local hoods.
Dickey is a creative storyteller, with a gift for understanding his characters' deep-seated motivations, and the ability to write witty dialogue where what's left unsaid is as important as what's verbalized. Dickey makes good use of Los Angeles as a silent character, describing a city that is both seductive and sinister, and as often light and airy as it is dark and foreboding, a place peopled by "pretentious tribes who lived like life had no price tag. Cartoons and caricatures of human beings who faked the funk and existed on the wrong side of their true income. Image was their only reality."
Like the characters created by his namesake, the Dante of Thieves' Paradise is on a journey through the underworld. In the underbelly of Los Angeles he searches for, and eventually finds, his own personal redemption.
