Heaven's a Lie

Joette Harper, the heroine of Wallace Stroby's action-packed ninth novel, Heaven's a Lie, lives paycheck to paycheck. The young widow's job as a desk clerk at a run-down Jersey Shore motel barely pays enough to maintain her decaying trailer, since most of her money goes toward her mother's medical bills and nursing home fees.

Her break may come in the oddest way. Driving erratically at high speed, Thomas Nash crashes his BMW outside the motel one night. As Joette drags him from the wreckage, he tells her to grab a bag in the trunk, which she does seconds before the car goes up in flames. A couple minutes later, Nash dies. She rationalizes keeping the nearly $300,000 she finds in the bag, knowing it would pay her debts, care for her mother and help the single mother and her daughter who live at the motel. Of course, no one just drives around with all that cash--Nash is a drug dealer who planned to steal the money from his partner Travis Clay, whose greed is matched by his propensity for violence. The money isn't mentioned in the police report, but Travis is spurred to retrieve his cash after finding evidence that Joette isn't just a good Samaritan. While Joette shouldn't be a match for Travis's ruthlessness, she is driven by sheer determination to stop being on the losing end of life.

Stroby (Some Die Nameless) has an affinity for brisk storytelling that keeps Heaven's a Lie on a breathless path. The tidy plot elevates the novel into a metaphor for the country's current economic downturn, and the appealing Joette keeps readers firmly on her side, even when she is skirting the law. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer 

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