The Players

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Reynolds takes leave of the pre-Civil War West Franklin's Crossing, 1992 in this hard-driving yarn brimming with the dregs of today's Texas underworld: self-styled mob bosses, shysters, con artists, pimps, whores, burned-out cops and other assorted redneck losers. Antihero Eddy Lovell is a well-born but ill-omened ex-SMU football jock reduced to working as a wheel man for Moria, a Dallas crime boss. When Eddy comes into possession of a briefcase containing two mysterious and very valuable compact discs, his low-down, high-society siblings, who want the discs for themselves, devise a ransom scheme involving kidnapping Eddy's daughter. But the abductors get the wrong girl, and the action explodes into a violent car chase, from Hollywood to a southwest Texas state park, with bombings and wholesale executions marking the trail. Despite repetitious exposition and a penchant for the burlesque including a severed head delivered via FedEx Reynold's hard-edged prose is well calculated to captivate the reader right up to the final trigger squeeze. Film rights to Daydream Entertainment. July

Library Journal

This drive-in movie of a book is worthy of a review by Joe Bob Briggs: "Dozens of dead bodies, twelve breasts, kung-fu co-eds: Joe Bob says check it out." Reynolds Franklin's Crossing, Dutton, 1993 has constructed a nonstop narrative orgy of violence and senseless crime that may appeal to someone, but the question is whom. Eddy Lovell, a failed football player, gets involved with the Texas underworld, and the far-fetched plot that ensues involves loan-sharks, pimps, sophisticated computer programs that can find out any information about anyone in the world, Hollywood hopefuls, kidnapping, and all that gratuitous, graphic violence. Promotional hype comparing Reynolds to Elmore Leonard is ludicrous: where Leonard is deft and spare, Reynolds is obvious and belabored. Not recommended.David Dodd, Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Kirkus Reviews

All hell breaks loose in the Texas underworld when two immensely valuable compact disks (containing all-purpose eavesdropping/surveillance programs developed by a covert federal agency) goes missing after a botched highway robbery: a bleak, unsentimental but engrossing thriller from Reynolds (Franklin's Crossing, 1992, etc.).

Three years after the fatal CD hijacking (in which he played a fall-guy role that cost him time in a state prison), Eddy Lovell is working for Dallas racketeer Moria Mendle. An unlucky sort whose post-SMU football hopes were dashed by a knee injury, the sometime linebacker cares about little in life other than his daughter Barbara, who was taken from him as an adolescent by his wealthy sister Hillary with the connivance of brother Quincy, a well- connected Houston lawyer. Eddy and Barbara nonetheless manage to maintain phone contact, even after she flees to southern California to escape her domineering aunt. In Houston with Mendle (who's investigating the savage murder of his partner) and a sphinx-like bodyguard, the ex-con learns that Barbara has been abducted at the behest of the corrupt Hillary and Quincy, who are still looking for those priceless CDs. Vicki Sigel, an actress friend of Barbara's, has also been abducted by thugs in search of the CDs, but she proves herself a tough cookie on a wild, homicidal ride from Los Angeles to Balmorhea State Park in west Texas. Eddy's unprincipled siblings and boss head by different routes for a rendezvous at the Park. In a bloody, last-stand windup, armed, dangerous, and desperate players take a heavy toll on one another before G-men (who've infiltrated the ranks of all interested parties) pop out of the underbrush to claim the CDs and ensure everyone left standing gets approximately what's coming to them.

A fine, twisty tale of betrayal, crime, and punishment among lowlifes at all socioeconomic levels of the Lone Star State.