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Super sports agent Alexander Drouhin, a handsome, ruthless, slick lawyer, and his motley support team inhabit a cut-throat world obsessed with money, fame, and power, so when Drouhin is found with a couple of .44 slugs in his head, there is no shortage of suspects. By the time Lt Francis Clay arrives at the crime scene, it appears that everyone has an alibi and no one has a clue.
More than a detective story, The Agent, is an unrelenting examination of a world in which no outrageous amount of money is ever enough and there is more to the game than just scoring points. George V Higgins, master of the literary thriller, turns his eye for detail and ear for dialogue to the seamy underside of the high powered, high dollar world of sports agenting.
'one for Higgins connoisseurs'
- Sunday Telegraph [read the full review]
The Agent is one of the last books by the admired George V. Higgins...It has the usual Higgins trademarks: carefully detailed descriptions of people and places and, instead of conversations, his characters make speeches, often several pages long.
His picture of the American sporting world, with its power-hungry agents and brattish athletes, all awash with millions of dollars, is appallingly fascinating. The police investigation into the murder of one of the leading figures in all this mostly consists of listening to the suspects' views of the dead man.
It's one for Higgins connoisseurs, who don't mind the slow pace and will appreciate the sly repartee of the detective leading the inquiry.
Sunday Telegraph
'Higgins is my favourite. No, he doesn't learn from me, I learn from him'
- Elmore Leonard
'He is still the best'
- John Grisham
'As the detective gets his interviewees to talk, we spiral slowly closer to the truth in a flood of Boston English. It's glorious, boastful Higgins-talk - no one pours, drips and spatters words onto the page like George V., the Jackson Pollock of banter'
- San Francisco Chronicle
'No one writes better police procedurals than Higgins...a powerful screed against greed; above all, and always, he is a moralist. The Agent resonates because it's an angry book, and the author's real subject is paradise lost'
- Boston Globe