Review of Their Wildest Dreams: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

Several stories of varied characters converge in a literally explosive climax in this extraordinarily well written novel. On the Mexican US border outside of Tucson, lives Mackie Larkin, a divorced housewife who dreams of owning a dance studio but after a failed real estate deal, desperately needs money just to make ends meet. Her daughter, Lianne falls for an older man who works at the same ranch her father does. Nicholas Loeb is a mystery writer who travels to rural Arizona to get hands on experience in law enforcement. Buck Samsonov is a crime lord who runs a couple of strip joints in the region. All their paths converge in this very clever crime novel. The question is who will be on top in the end.
After a slow start the plot becomes increasingly fast paced once we get to know each of the characters and their separate problems. Alternate chapters are used initially to reveal the individual characters. Part of the change in momentum occurs when the characters' lives converge making the separation by chapter no longer necessary.The characters, a major strength of the work, are all original creations. The conclusion is a bit problematic and unrealistic. However, this one is well written and very much worthy of a reader's time.

Product Description

"Peter Abrahams is my favorite American suspense novelist."
-STEPHEN KING

"Mackie dreaded the mail." From this simple beginning, Peter Abrahams opens the curtains on a mesmerizing world down on the Mexican border, a world of complex and passionate people whose ambitions will lead them on a relentless collision course, a desert world that rises to the mythic in Their Wildest Dreams. The suspense will grab you and not let go, the surprises will shock you, but in the end it will be the wonderful characters who linger in your mind.

Characters like Mackie Larkin, a suburban mother desperate for money, who finds she can earn it as a stripper; Kevin Larkin, her ex-husband whose get-rich-quick schemes left her with a mountain of debt, and who now dreams up an even better one; Lianne, their beautiful, impulsive teenage daughter, for whom almost anything, even bank robbery, is possible; Jimmy Marz, the wrangler she loves, who gets a dangerous onetime offer that could take him to the life he's always wanted; Buck Samsonov, the charismatic strip-club owner building a southwestern empire in the lawless style of a 19th-century robber baron; Clay Krupsha, a twenty-first-century captain of detectives in a border town where no crime is what it seems; and Nicholas Loeb, a struggling mystery writer whose encounter with an unstable muse entangles him in a web of true crime more mysterious than anything he imagined.

Utterly original, multilayered, and marked by the gripping suspense, sharp wit, and fascinating psychological insights for which Peter Abrahams has been acclaimed, here is a major work-a riveting story of modern-day desperadoes living their wildest dreams.


From the Hardcover edition.

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