Sunday New York Times      October 30, 2005

Wolf Point By Edward Falco

This three-character cat-and-mouse thriller plunges straight into its Hitchcockian plot.  A disgraced businessman, T, picks up a young couple, Jenny and Lester, who are hitchhiking, armed with, respectively, impressive cleavage and a lead pipe.  Once he dissuades them from bashing his skull in and taking his car, T gives them a lift to a secluded cabin near Alexandria Bay in the Thousand Islands.  He ends up staying with them, even though they're obviously con artists at best and probably a lot worse--Jenny keeps cuddling up to him, Lester seems more or less psychopathic, and both of them make it clear that they'd like a whole lot of money from him to clear up a drug deal gone bad.  Inevitably, revelations, double crosses and violence ensue.  The story could be short-circuited at virtually any point by T wising up enough to drive away by himself.  Why doesn't he?  Well, he's got something like a death wish (having been busted for downloading child pornography, he's got little to live for besides his memories of a long-ago affair with one of his professors), and he's desperate enough for human interaction and fascinated enough by grotesquerie that he's willing to risk his neck just to see how the whole sordid business is going to turn out.  Falco's prose is cold and brisk, with occasional flashes of hard-boiled eloquence, and the story hurtles like a brakeless truck toward its bloody denouement.