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After the huge success of his last book, “East of A,” Russell Atwood dives into his new book, “Losers Live Longer.”
Our story begins in New York City. Peyton Sherwood searches his office for a pair of shoes to make a good impression on the infamous PI, George Rowell (aka Owl). However, the narrative begins quickly at the sound of a crash, and we follow our detective as he dashes out of his home without shoes and into the city’s streets. The audience is soon led about the city by barefooted Sherwood who finds that the famous PI had been murdered. At one point, he solemnly remembers his lost mentor: “At Second Avenue, I stood on the same corner Owl had three hours ago. In the road the tar and pavement was partly worn away, torn up by snowplows and the patches never setting, so the cobblestones beneath peeked out like bare ribs through a tattered shroud.”
Atwood doesn’t just tie together a few quick snapshots of the city to lay down a setting for a completely plot-driven book, as many other detective and crime writers do. Instead, the artistry and intensity of the description as well as the characters’ monologues, reveal a deeper and sometimes humorous, storyline.
The city’s exhilaration and repulsion continues to charm readers as Sherwood uncovers the truth about Owl’s murder. He drunkenly tries to charm a dark-haired beauty from Eastern Europe and learns the secret of an unlikely man who takes charge of an easy moneymaking situation. He attempts to outwit a smartass teenaged skateboarder while searching for a pair of shoes in a stakeout near the Yaffa Cafe. The story really begins to pick up when an iPod containing some revealing truths goes missing. And suddenly it appears that Sherwood gets himself even deeper into the truth of some shocking international crimes.
And once the story is revealed, Atwood pulls together this great tradition of crime novels and modern pop culture, like references to Tootsie Pops, Alice Cooper, Grover from “Sesame Street” and even IMDB. Atwood’s artistry does something that not many writers do these days — he pulls you into the story with his characters by giving you intense descriptions.
In the end, each shocking plot twist and interwoven character connection in “Losers Live Longer” cleverly connects one exhilarating scene to another, and the loose ends always get tied up.
So, does our main character ever get shoes? Sherwood tells the reader, “This is the East Village, I told myself, there’ll be shoes. Unless, of course, the neighborhood had changed that much, like the rest of the city around it, diluted and deluded, desecrated and desiccated, its character and flavor all but gone. If so, then I was lost here.” Anyone who’s ever worn flip-flops in New York knows how dirty your feet can become, so a few scenes later, after some important plot twists are discovered, Atwood returns to that important detail after Sherwood looks down at the blackened soles of his feet. Sherwood explains, “And then I look up and there they were, sitting atop the lid of the next garbage pail over. A pair of black leather men’s dress shoes.”