Angle of Attack
About this ebook
A year ago, Marco Scorvelli was murdered while picking up his morning paper. A sawed-off shotgun put a hole in his stomach, and streaked the inside of his sports coat with the mob boss's innards. As Scorvelli crawled towards his front door, the killer left the shotgun angled neatly on the sidewalk. No prints were recovered, and no headway was ever made on the case. Now a reliable underworld source passes a message to homicide detective Gabe Wager. The killing wasn't ordered by a rival family, but by Scorvelli's brother, in an attempt to take control of the organization. After a year of peace, a war is about to erupt between Denver's Italian and Hispanic crime syndicates, and Gabe Wager will be in the middle, trying to keep the city from burning to the ground.
About the author
Rex Burns (b. 1935) is the author of numerous thrillers set in and around Denver, Colorado. Born in California, he served in the Marine Corps and attended Stanford University and the University of Minnesota before becoming a writer. His Edgar award-winning first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975), introduced Gabe Wager, a Denver police detective working in an organized crime unit. Burns continued this hard-boiled series through ten more novels, concluding it with 1997's The Leaning Land. One of the Wager mysteries, The Avenging Angel (1983), was adapted as a feature film, Messenger of Death, starring Charles Bronson. Burns's other series centers on Devlin Kirk, a Denver private detective whose specialty is industrial security. Introduced in Suicide Season (1989), Kirk appeared in two more novels. Once a monthly mystery review columnist in the Rocky Mountain News, Burns has also written nonfiction and hosted the Mystery Channel's Anatomy of a Mystery. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado.