BUTCHER'S MOON

Master thief Parker would run over his grandmother were she in the way, and Michael Kramer sounds just like him. Not that Parker speaks that much, but there are plenty of others on whom Kramer exercises his flat American voice with its marvelous talent for vocal characterization. BUTCHER'S MOON is a sequel to SLAYGROUND, one of Stark's (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake's) best known, it introduces Alan Grofield, a smooth sometime actor who appears in several later books and stars in four of his own. I was sorry to see one of the SLAYGROUND characters killed off, but he was a Mafia murderer, and the fact that the listener could react with sympathy is a tribute to both Westlake and Kramer. D.R.W. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 02/ JAN 03]