Pg. 69: Daniel Friedman's "Don't Ever Look Back"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery by Daniel Friedman.

About the book, from the publisher:

DON'T EVER GET OLD was one of mystery-publishing's biggest critical successes last year, earning starred reviews from every major trade publication, garnering nominations for the Edgar, Thriller, and Anthony awards, and winning the Macavity Award for Best First Novel. The producer of four Harry Potter films and the Sherlock Holmes sequel, Lionel Wigram, is set to produce the film version.

In Daniel Friedman's new novel, set in Memphis, Tennessee, and four months after the events of DON'T EVER GET OLD, eighty-eight-year-old Buck Schatz is reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that he can only move around with the aid of a walker, and his dementia seems to be getting worse.

So when one of Buck’s long-time foes, a bank-robber named Elijah, comes to Buck looking for protection from mysterious pursuers, Buck wavers. In the end, his desire to cement his legacy by closing out a series of long-unsolved robberies overwhelms his usual antipathy toward doing favors for people he dislikes. Buck agrees to broker Elijah's surrender to the authorities, if Elijah will promise to confess to his long-ago crimes.

But nothing involving Elijah, or Buck, is ever simple, and Elijah's plans for Buck are more sinister than they first appeared.

Written in Buck's signature voice and featuring a mystery that will knock your socks off, DON'T EVER LOOK BACK takes a decades-old feud between two dangerous—and now elderly—men and brings it to a final, explosive conclusion.

Visit Daniel Friedman's blog.

The Page 69 Test: Don't Ever Look Back.

--Marshal Zeringue