Schedule Two

by Gaylord Dold

Grace Wu waits in shadow, in a black curve that cuts away from tunnels made by the headlights of squad cars, which have been parked to create a halo effect. She regards the scene with detachment, a way she has of freeing herself from the tag ends and codes of her kind, and still be a part of what’s going down.

Grace Wu has been undercover in the San Francisco Bay Area drug trade for nearly two years. Posing as a cabbie and buying and selling drugs daily, the twenty- eight year-old Chinese-American woman reports only to two men: John Zito, her superior in the SFPD, and Elgin Lightfoot of the DEA. After two years of the same routine, Grace is poised to go after Kyungmoon Nho, the local connection for one of the largest heroin smuggling rings in the Pacific Rim. Supported from one side and undermined by the other, Grace is virtually alone in this complex operation, where the outcome is at the mercy of each participant’s dreams and fears: Grace’s relationship with her heroin addicted brother; John Zito’s obsession with vodka; Kyungmoon Nho’s ambitions for advancement within his organization.

Schedule Two may superficially resemble a traditional police procedural story, but reader’s will be rewarded with rich character portraits, an intricate plot and nail-biting suspense.



Gaylord Dold is one of those restless writers who keep the genre from going stale. Merciless studies of human nature in the raw.

Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

To me it seems in a league with Dog Soldiers…What makes Schedule Two a terrific novel is Gaylord Dold’s singular prose and lacerating insights. He draws characters of a variety of backgrounds and draws them beautifully, with depth and grace, and it is beguiling to watch them spin, caught as they are in the pitiless web of the tale he tells. Simply masterful.

Daniel Woodrell, author of Give us a Kiss and Winter’s Bone

The seamless splicing and fast-moving plot with some very limber prose result in another memorable crime work.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An intricate plot full of double crosses, counterfeit money, and a slam-bang conclusion…one of the best crime novels of the year.

Booklist (starred review)

Luminous characters and prose of spare and near-hallucinatory grace make Schedule Two the best mystery of 1996.

The Portland Oregonian

225 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Gaylord Dold was born in Kansas and raised in southern California during the good old days. He was educated at the University of Kansas, the University of California, and the London School of Economics, where he took an advanced degree in international law. Before becoming a professional writer, he worked as a chauffeur, theater usher, legal services attorney, law professor and volunteer mentor. He is the co-founder and managing editor of Watermark Press which published works like Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brien, which later became a film directed by Mike Figgis, starring Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue. Dold has published eighteen novels and five travel guides. Many of his crime novels have received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist; many have been praised by Marilyn Stasio and others in the New York Times Book Review and in newspapers like the Portland Oregonian, The Washington Post and Boston Herald. His novel Schedule Two was picked as the best crime novel of 1996 by the Portland Oregonian, while his legal thriller The Devil to Pay was picked as one the best ten crime novels of 1998. His novels have been published in Japan, England, and Brazil. Dold has read his work throughout the United States and has conducted numerous writing workshops. He published The Last Man in Berlin in 2004, a novel set in pre-Nazi Germany during the early 1930s. Most recently he has completed and published three contemporary crime novels, two featuring ex-Marine Jack Kilgore, and one a dystopian science fiction thriller called The Swarming Stage.
After twenty-five years of non-stop work, Dold has, since 2006, taken time off to travel and write five books, including novels, a memoir, and a YA that takes place in Wyoming. At present he continues researching non-fiction books about fly fishing on the old Mountain Man rendezvous sites and along the Continental Divide, writing science fiction, and is busy on a new fiction suspense novel about dream research
These days, Dold is at home on the southern prairie. He is an adept fly fisherman, an ardent gardener and an amateur pianist and guitarist. He rides horses poorly and loves dogs. He continues to travel widely in the Caribbean, the south Pacific and the western Rockies.

Visit the author at gaylorddold.com

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

not the worst book I've ever read but nothing particularly outstanding about it either. The characters were somewhat steretypical (the dirty cop, the good cop who gets a raw deal and turns vigilante, the lost soul trying to run from his past and save others from his fate)though not so overly stereotypical that you don't care a little bit about them. As is often the case for me, I leave the book unsatisfied with the ending.