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Everybody Dies

Name: Everybody Dies
Author: Lawrence Block
ISBN: 9780380725359

by Lawrence Block

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Overview

Matt Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. The crime rate's down and the stock market's up. Gentrification's prettying-up the old neighborhood. The New York streets don't look so mean anymore.

Then all hell breaks loose.

Scudder quickly discovers the spruced-up sidewalks are as mean as ever, dark and gritty and stained with blood. He's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question. It's a world where nothing is certain and nobody's safe, a random universe where no one's survival can be taken for granted. Not even his own.

A world where everybody dies.

Synopsis

The mystery series is a tricky beast. Writers must strike a balance between familiar elements and characters that draw readers in repeatedly, and they must create the edge-of-your-seat jeopardy necessary for truly dangerous reading. Go too far in the first direction, and you get formulaic pap. Hew too closely to the edge, and you risk being cut off from readers who aren't able to maintain their attachments. Lawrence Block's newest novel, Everybody Dies, could be read as a blueprint for succeeding at this high-wire act.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

A taut noir story one of Lawrence Block's best.

About the Author, Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is one of the most widely recognized names in the mystery genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar and Shamus Awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He received the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association—only the third American to be given this award. He is a prolific author, having written more than fifty books and numerous short stories, and is a devoted New Yorker and an enthusiastic global traveler.

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Editorials

Marilyn Stasio

One of the most harrowing yet most rewarding chapters in the education of a hero.
-- New York Times Book Review

Entertainment Weekly

Lean, solid, always intelligent.

Philadelphia Inquirer

When Lawrence Block is in his Matt Scudder mode, crime fiction can sidle up so close to literature that often there's no degree ofdifference Fists and bullets fly, blood is shed in buckets and yet Scudder's complex internal life has never been more deeplyplumbed. Which is to say he's never been more interesting.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

A taut noir story one of Lawrence Block's best.

Publishers Weekly

The body count is indeed high in this latest Matt Scudder tale, which is also the best since A Walk Among the Tombstones (1993) -- resonant, thoughtful, richly textured and capped by a slam-bang windup. At the center of the case is Matt's old buddy, Mick Ballou, the murderous and hard-drinking Irish mobster with a deeply philosophical streak who is one of Block's most enduring creations. Two of Mick's henchmen have been killed in what should have been a routine liquor hijacking. After Scudder helps Mick bury the bodies at the mobster's upstate farm, he finds he has been targeted himself. Two hoods try to rough him up on the street, then an old friend, Matt's sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous, is gunned down in a restaurant after being mistaken for Matt. It soon becomes clear that someone from Ballou's past is aiming to destroy him, and Matt, caught in the crossfire, has to try to determine who's behind the mayhem. He does so in his usual ruminative way, working it out with wife Elaine, streetwise sidekick TJ and old cop comrades who are now, because of his friendship with Ballou, against him. In the end, Matt has to stand alone with Ballou to put a stop to the vendetta in a blaze of gunfire. Block's seamless weave of thought and action, and his matchless gift for dialogue that is true, funny and revealing, have seldom been on more effective display. The pages leading up to the climax have an almost Shakespearean feel for human resignation in the face of mortality. (Publisher's Weekly best book of 1998)

Library Journal

The prolific Block (e.g., Tanner on Ice, LJ 7/98) is well known among mystery fans for two series: one featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr and the other Matthew Scudder. This is the 14th Scudder tale, and by now the recovering alcoholic ex-cop has become respectable, with a wife and a PI license. When his best friend, an Irish gangster, finds himself the target of an unknown assassin, Scudder begins asking questions and soon joins the hit list as bodies begin to turn up. As usual, Block shows that actions have consequences -- past events come back with a vengeance, and Scudder's interior conflicts drive the series. The dialog is unusually stiff, but Block has won nearly every mystery award, his fans are legion, and any new Scudder story is sure to be in demand everywhere.
-- Roland C. Person, Southern Illinois University Library, Carbondale

Anthony Smith

...[A]fter a hundred pages, this novel picks up heat and speed.....Scudder fans will be satisfied once again. It's violent, but not so much as before. Most of all, the story explores what people do for friendship. And there are plenty of gunfights, too....Block is a great one who has written great books, so for that, I will mark Everybody Dies as an average effort while waiting for his next Scudder or Keller, see what comes to his mind next.
— Mystery Magazine Online

Wall Street Journal

One of the very best writers now working the beat.

GQ

A virtuoso.

Kirkus Reviews

Mick Ballou can't tell the cops about the men who broke into his storage room in Jersey, murdered two of his errand boys, and carted off the liquor that was stored there, since Mick had stolen the booze himself. Instead, he calls Matthew Scudder. Even though Scudder is more respectable than ever, he's married his longtime companion Elaine Mardell and gotten a private investigator's license at lastþhe helps Mick and his driver Andy Buckley bury the bodies, and noses around just enough to satisfy himself that he can't tell whether the thieves were opportunists or personal enemies. But Scudder, his modest task completed, doesn't take himself off the case fast enough for the killers, who are only getting started. They arrange to have him beaten, they send a shooter after him, and then they go after Mick in earnest. The body count, as the title suggests, is fearsome. But even more harrowing is the obsession with death that grips everybody Scudder talks to, from gay albino African-American Danny Boy Bell, who's constantly updating his list of all the people he knows who've died, to Mick, still fabled 30 years later as having celebrated his victory over a rival mobster by toting around a hideous trophy in a bowling bag. Not as breathtakingly plotted as Scudder's last, Even the Wicked (1997), but still an unforgettable dispatch from a world in which there are no real survivors, just guys who haven't died yet.