THE VIG

Payback is murder. A beautiful woman paid it with her body. A seedy lawyer used somebody else’s money. It’s the vig—the exorbitant interest mob loan sharks take on their money. Now, in the City by the Bay, everyone has to pay…

Down-and-out lawyer Rusty Ingraham left behind a murdered woman and a houseboat splattered with blood. All the evidence said Ingraham was in San Francisco Bay. Dead. But a friend of Ingraham’s, former cop and prosecutor Dismas Hardy, isn’t so sure. And Hardy has to find out, because a stone-cold killer, now paroled, once threatened to kill Ingraham and Dismas Hardy both.

To save his own skin, Hardy must face down liars and killers on both sides of the law. From mob foot soldiers to brokenhearted lovers to renegade cops, a dozen lives are tied to the fate of Rusty Ingraham—and the payback has only just begun.

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Praise for THE VIG

“A tense, tough, page-turning plot that grips you from the moment Diz finds a dead body on a houseboat in China Basin.”

—Playboy

“Gripping . . . A large cast, swift pacing and good local color.”

—Publishers Weekly

“All the subplots are kept in perfect focus and proportion. A tense, satisfyingly complex sequel to Dead Irish.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Lescroart is, as before, splendid on the San Francisco scene and on the misture of cynicism and fatalism by which the police (Lescroart’s anyway) proceed. Hardy is one of the more real and engaging characters in recent crime-solving.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“John Lescroart again proves himself and up-and-coming contender in the field of detective fiction.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

Donald I. Fine Hardcover, 1991; Dell Paperback, 1998