Citizen Vince

<p>Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel of the Year</p> <p>"You just have to read it . . . . Utterly inventive. . . excruciatingly breathless." --Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post</p> <p>From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins: a riveting story of witness protection, petty thievery, local politics, and murder--set against the turbulent backdrop of the 1980 presidential election</p> <p>It's the fall of 1980, the last week before the presidential election that pits the downtrodden Jimmy Carter against the suspiciously sunny Ronald Reagan. In a seedy suburban house in Spokane, a small-time crook formerly from New York, Vince Camden, pockets his weekly allotment of stolen credit cards and heads off to his witness-protection job at a donut shop. At the shop he takes a shine to a regular named Kelly, who works for a local politician. Somehow he finds himself and the politician in a parking lot at three in the morning, giving the slip to a couple of menacing thugs. And then he crosses the path of a young detective--and discovers his credit-scam partner, lying dead in his passport-photo office with a Cheerio-size bullet-hole in his head. No one writing crime novels today tells a story or sketches a character with more freshness or élan than Jess Walter. Citizen Vince is his funniest and grittiest book yet.</p>