Ring Around a Rogue

Ring Around A Rogue” is a fun pulpy paperback about the car sales industry, the pressure of sales, and a hot car ring. It offers us a glimpse of 1950’s San Francisco, a hard-drinking, hard-working town.

When a customer wants the goods on why his car is a lemon, an entire business starts to unravel and you can just feel the walls closing in on car dealer, aptly named Jere Deal. And you can feel the urgency to get this mess straightened out before all hell breaks loose and the corpses start piling up and Deal’s head is in the noose.

The author, particularly towards the beginning of the book, does a great job of piling an entire university me into a few lines. It opens: “They came for him in the San Francisco night; hard-muscled, smooth-moving men. Three, maybe four darker shapes in the fog.”