Citizen Vince

<p>From the highly acclaimed new crime novelist: a story of witness protection petty thievery local politics and murder--set against the turbulent backdrop of the 1980 presidential election</p> <p>It's the fall of 1980 the last week before the presidential election that pits the downtrodden Jimmy Carter against the suspiciously sunny Ronald Reagan. In a seedy suburban house in Spokane a small-time crook formerly from New York Vince Camden pockets his weekly allotment of stolen credit cards and heads off to his witness-protection job at a donut shop. A the shop he takes a shine to a regular named Kelly who works for a local politician. Somehow he finds himself and the politician in a parking lot at three in the morning giving the slip to a couple of menacing thugs. And then he crosses the path of a young detective--and discovers his credit-scam partner lying dead in his passport-photo office with a Cheerio-size bullet-hole in his head. No one writing crime novels today tells a story or sketches a character with more freshness or elan than Jess Walter. Citizen Vince is his funniest and grittiest book yet.</p>