Title: Payback
Author: Sally A. Allen
Publisher: PageTurner Press and Media
ISBN: 978-1638717362
Pages: 282
Genre: Fiction / Crime / Thriller
Reviewed by: Jake Bishop
Hollywood Book Reviews
Multiple lives intertwine in this imaginative crime tale from author Sally A. Allen. Friends, relatives, good guys and bad – they are all involved in a yarn with twists, turns, and revelations galore. Before readers have reached denouements and final conflicts, different characters have been introduced, eliminated, had remarkable experiences changed for the worse or the better, and have been tangentially related to a fateful crime which will lead to many more before the last page is turned.
The novel begins when Rock gets out of prison. He has served ten years for a robbery which he wanted no part of to begin with. While he has kept from becoming a stool pigeon and ratting out the three friends who initiated the heist, he’s also nurtured a long-standing desire to wreak havoc on their lives for getting him involved and having to take the fall on his own. Rock becomes the beneficiary of the kindness of strangers when a long-haul trucker gives him a ride and money to get by on. Then he’s lucky enough to secure a job and meet a landlady who’ll put a roof over his head until his regular paychecks start coming. But even with all these good things happening in Rock’s life, he can’t quite eliminate his appetite for payback.
Before you know it, Rock is getting back involved with his former love, Ellen. She is standoffish at first but soon succumbs to Rock’s charms. Hehas already begun his revenge as one of the three poker playing pals that took him down the criminal path is soon eliminated. Then another turns up dead in what appears to be an automobile accident. But the remaining co-conspirator, Rick, turns out to be far and away the toughest nut to crack. He spends lots of money, plays fast and loose with his life, his wife, and his mistress, all the while showing himself virtually capable of any and all villainy.
Additional characters come into play that supercharge the ever expanding plot. There is an alcoholic private detective, a hit man who is not as good at his job as he ought to be, a police chief intent on running things down and putting all the pieces together, a good girl who gets in a bad way and almost loses her life for being enamored with more than one cad, plus Mafia types and gossipy old ladies. In the middle of it all, surprises and revelations begin to emerge which tie some characters to others in ways the reader will never have imagined.
If you’re the type of reader who likes complex story lines plus consequential coincidences, and you are easily able to willingly suspend disbelief in pursuit of knotted loose ends and the comeuppance of those involved in dastardly doings, then you may well find yourself smiling as you rapidly race through the pages of Payback.