THE LAST DEEP BREATH by Tom Piccirilli

There's something sneaky about Tom Piccirilli's writing. His plots, such as in this novella, were deceptively simple. Here, we have a brooding drifter traveling across country from New York City to Hollywood in a search to find the man who put a 4-inch knife in his sister's side. It seems like a pretty straightforward crime thriller, but as everyone should come to expect from Tommy Pic's work, by the end of this short book, you discover that it's all a ploy, a simple vehicle (as most good crime fiction should be) to touch on complex topics like violent natures and the meaning of family and why you choose to include certain people in that category. And even then, you get the sense that the story is about even more than that. It feels like these later books by Piccirilli can't be fully appreciated in one reading. But I haven't been dissatisfied with a Piccirilli book so far. With each book, he quickly climbs higher on my favorite authors list.

She had an easy way about her, an effortless laugh that sounded just a little too natural. It was the soft melody of every woman you wanted to lie beside, your head resting in her lap while she stroked your forehead. You look up into her eyes and she leans down, gives you the killer grin, her bee-stung lips parting to meet your own.

GRADE: B+