Big Red's Daughter

John McPartland's second novel Big Red's Daughter begins in gripping fashion, as a strikingly beautiful girl (Wild Kearny) abandons her tough guy boyfriend (Buddy Brown) to be with the book's narrator, an Army veteran named Jim Work. The rest of the book doesn't quite maintain its excellent opening, but it has good narrative tension as Work gets pulled into Kearny's (and Brown's) troubled life. This is a solid hardboiled pulp fiction thriller.