Glint

by Joseph Valentinetti

The object that drops Denver car salesman Quitman O'Neil into a world of trouble is a 1964-D Peace dollar. Never heard of it? Right, that's the The whole issue was destroyed except for a single survivor that Quitman finds--and casually pockets-- in the apartment of current lover Helen Costello. Word gets out in a couple of spare, breezy scenes, and suddenly Quitman's partner Marty Martinez is dead; Helen is dead, horribly; and the killer, Lester VanDyk, strong right arm of monomaniacal coin- collector Henry Lyman, is ready to get really nasty. The only obstacles between the bad guys and their $1 grail are Quitman, his remaining lover, Maria Stevenson--who just happens to be the homicide chief's jailbait daughter--and, of course, the double- crossing numismatists themselves. And Quitman, by now, has the advantage of not even wanting the $2 million the coin could ``He didn't care about the money, he just wanted to have it. A way to count who was winning.'' Newcomer Valentinetti's sparsely peopled payoff is something of a letdown. But he shapes scenes with a sizzling terseness that'll make you tingle. Like Hemingway, this guy knows just what to leave out.Kirkus Reviews

166 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Stephen Gallup · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crime fiction is not high on my list, but I've read enough of it to have a feel for the genre. I enjoyed this one.

Part of its appeal is the (I think) unusual angle of having the story revolve around coin collecting (a pasttime that briefly captivated me many years ago). I'm not sure everything here is entirely plausible. For example, I can accept a wealthy collector who is sufficiently bored and greedy that he'd be willing to pay for murder in order to add a one-of-a-kind item to his collection, but he'd be a lot more three-dimensional if there were some backstory or greater insight into what makes him think this way. I would expect at least his first attempts to get the coin to be less heavy-handed.

Still, I got into the thinking of the main character, very much enjoyed some of the dialog, and found I could not put down the book (or, rather, the e-reader). Which reminds me of the only other glitch in my particular version, which has nothing to do with the quality of the writing: I think something went awry in the conversion to ebook format that corrupted combinations of the letter l with certain other letters. Thus, on one page "guilty" comes out as "gudty," "little" as "litde," and "smile" as "smde." That would be worth fixing.

All in all, a very entertaining read, and one I'd recommend to others who go for this kind of fiction.

[Sharon Hagford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Story was good but there were A LOT of typos in the ebook and that detracted from the story for me.