Amazon Barnes & Noble Category:  Crime Publisher: L&L Dreamspell Type: Fiction Pages: 176 Copyright: 2010 ISBN-13: 9781603182768 A compact tale of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances and emotions: lust, greed, and the survival instinct.               Only the cop cars are black and white in Eddie Ryan’s world. Everything else swirls in a kind of gray soup, without any way of knowing who can be trusted or what awaits around the next corner. The novel opens as Eddie, a small-time bookie operating in the rough East End area of Houston, has just lost a bundle on the baseball World Series. For him, there’s only one way out: a phone call to Raymond Cannetta, a loan shark, with whom he's done business before. He borrows twenty thousand dollars from Cannetta to satisfy his bettors, but soon finds he can’t muster up the weekly re-payments. Fearing the consequences of missing a payment, he calls longtime friend Val Borden, a local pool hustler who is also on the edge of a financial cliff. Val is looking to move up, and he wants to provide a better life for himself and his Mexican-American girlfriend, Felina. She's exactly the kind of girl Eddie has always wanted but never could have: lovely, sexy, and willing. The threesome become entangled in a heist plan which has unintended consequences for all of them, causing Eddie to run for his life. He heads for New Orleans, but he finds only danger on the streets of the Big Easy.  Excerpt Eddie Ryan gazed absently out the window from his booth at Denny’s, until a sharp glint flicked across his eye, snapping him out of his misery. It was the sun reflecting off Raymond Cannetta’s shiny blue Lincoln as it pulled into the parking lot. On first glance, there was nothing scary about Cannetta. His medium size and soft-spoken manner didn’t add up to the beefy loan-shark stereotype. But when he slipped into the quiet booth across from Eddie, icing down the area with his volatile brown eyes, Eddie shivered. This close, he could see the dark streak, the violence lurking right under the surface, as though he’d held Cannetta up to the light. He tried to still the nervous hand that stirred his coffee. Cannetta poured a cup for himself from the pot on the table. "What’s up, Eddie?" "I had a bad week. I’m a little short, you know, and I-I need some cash to pay off my bettors." "How much?" "Nineteen grand." Cannetta didn’t reply right away. Rather, he gently sipped at his coffee, letting the figure hang out to dry, so Eddie would understand this was no ordinary loan. "Where’d they make this shit?" His thin face contracted into a grimace as he set the cup back down. "My stomach’s been telling me for some time now to quit this stuff. I ought to pay attention. But you know, I been drinking it for thirty-five years now. Six, seven cups a day. That’s a long time, Eddie. Hard to break a habit that’s been with you for that long." Eddie mumbled something in agreement, still rattling his spoon against the sides of the cup. "I’ll let you have twenty," Cannetta finally said, his eyes burning into Eddie’s. "Every Friday at noon you meet me here"--his index finger poked the tabletop--"and you pay me a grand plus another grand worth of vig. In twenty weeks, it’s paid off." The expression on his face asked Eddie if he agreed. "Agreed," Eddie replied. "Let’s go out to the car." Cannetta retrieved a briefcase from the trunk of the Lincoln. They got into the front seat, where he opened it. Eddie saw a flash of stacked currency inside. Cannetta pulled out a few of the banded bundles, then counted out twenty thousand dollars. He held out the thick handful of hundreds, as Eddie reached for it. But before Cannetta released it, he warned, "Remember, Eddie. One grand every Friday plus another grand in juice. No excuses. No bullshit." "Right, Raymond. Two grand. You’ll get it." Eddie surprised himself at how confident he sounded, as he took the money and stuffed it down his pants.

Vicki Hendricks, author of CRUEL POETRY
Dennis writes true noir. THE TAKE is a fast-motion train wreck from page one, twisting the reader’s heart for the desperate souls on a ride they never chose.

BooksAndPals.com
Descriptions of "The Take" describe it as noir (also known as black fiction). I always have to look up the word noir when I see it used. I have a sense what it means, but can't put it into words without prodding. According to Wikipedia, the website that knows everything, noir is a subset of "hardboiled fiction" (think Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, or more recently Robert Parker and Walter Mosley). The noir subset differs mainly in that the protagonist is typically not a detective, as is usually the case with a hardboiled novel, and tends to be self-destructive. Elmore Leonard is an example of a contemporary bestseller writing in this literary style.

From the synopsis above, it should be apparent that Eddie Ryan is a self-destructive protagonist. I'll often not find this type of character sympatric, yet Eddie was different. He took a bit of a gamble, let's call it a risk instead, just as any businessperson might. All his actions after that are a matter of doing what he thinks he must to survive.

Eddie's adventures will keep you on edge as he struggles to survive as you both try to decide whom he should trust. Whether he will escape and what price Eddie will have to pay is unclear until the end. Fan's of Elmore Leonard should find Mike Dennis an author worth watching - and worth reading.