Shaker

November 16, 2015
Screenwriter Frank’s well-plotted first novel will remind readers of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Hit man Roy Cooper flies from New York to Los Angeles to kill someone five days after L.A. suffers a major earthquake. The hit goes smoothly, but as Roy is searching for his rental car in North Hollywood, he sees three street kids, “none older than fourteen, fifteen tops,” taunting an old man in an alley. Roy intervenes, but he can’t prevent a kid armed with a .25 from shooting the man dead. The murder is caught on video, and the identity of the victim—a mayoral candidate viewed as a legitimate force for reform—gives Roy, who was wounded in the encounter, a higher profile than he’d like. Frank integrates Roy’s story, complete with flashbacks, with that of Science, one of the young thugs, and of Kelly Maguire, an LAPD officer with a reputation for racism, along the way revealing their inner lives in impressive psychological detail. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

January 1, 2016
Celebrated screenwriter Frank (Get Shorty) delivers a gripping, strikingly original debut novel about an off-the-radar hit man who becomes an inadvertent hero and is thrust into the limelightjust where he cannot be if he hopes to stay alive. Roy Cooper is a disinterested sort of killer; he does his work because it's what he knows how to do, which is exactly what he's doing in L.A. when he stumbles upon a group of gangbangers terrorizing a jogger, who happens to be a mayoral candidate. Roy intervenes, but the jogger is murdered and Roy seriously wounded. A video made by an observer goes viral, and Roy is suddenly very much on everyone's radar screen, including the psychotic Albert, once Roy's mentor but now his enemy. Frank layers multiple subplots involving a host of other characters over Roy's story, as well as tracking back across Roy's early life. It may be a bit too much story, dulling the laser-like intensity of the opening, but every one of the charactersin particular the teenage gangbangerssprings to vivid and tragic life. If Frank sticks with novel writing, expect great things to come.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2015

Roy Cooper travels to Los Angeles, completes a hit for a New York criminal even as an earthquake rocks the city, and, when he's caught between a jogger and the four meanies beating him to death, ends up in the hospital--and in the papers, celebrated as a hero for presumably trying to intervene. Hotheaded LAPD detective Kelly Maguire, though, has his doubts. From an established screenwriter and director.

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