Small Crimes

Reviews / Votes

If the road to hell is paved to paved with good intentions, it may also be lined with small crimes. Classic noir, dark, funny, shocking and absolutely no compromise. Pure magic of the blackest kind. -- Ken Bruen So noir... all the way to a surprisingly bold ending... Fairly zips along -- Laura Wilson * Guardian * Zeltserman delves deeply into his specialty, an unorthodox look at the criminal mind. It kept me turning pages and glancing over my shoulder. -- Vicki Hendricks Small Crimes is a superbly crafted tale. Immensely subtle, and written with a rare maturity and confidence... This deserves to be massive -- Allan Guthrie This is a corrosive second novel of considerable impact. This loamy smorgasboard of salvation and revenge has both a violent and comic edge, marking Zeltserman as a name to watch. * Crime Time * Zeltserman's breakthrough crime novel deserves comparison with the best of James Ellroy * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * Zeltserman creates an intense atmospheric maze for readers to observe Denton's twisting and turning between his rocks and hard places. Denton is one of the best-realised characters I have read in this genre, and the powerfully noir-ish, uncompromising plot, which truly keeps one guessing from page to page, culminates with a genuinely astonishing finale * Sunday Express * Small Crimes is the kind of grim noir novel they used to write in the Thirties and Forties. There are no good guys, only men who are mean, vicious, tough, corrupt and amoral. Action is frenzied and bloody, women easy but vulnerable, dialogue curt... Zeltserman serves up the formula with enthusiasm and some fine writing -- Marcel Berlins * Times * If Zeltserman keeps writing novels as terrific as Small Crimes... he may churn out a corpus that rivals Cain's...
The plot of Small Crimes is a thing of beauty: spare but ingeniously twisted and imbued with a glossy coating of black humor. Zeltserman takes up all the familiar tropes of the formula - femmes fatales, frighteningly dysfunctional families, self-destructive drives and the death grip of the past - and shows how infinite are the combinations that can still be played on them. -- Maureen Corrigan * Washington Post * Zeltserman has superimposed a Jim Thompson mentality on a Norman Rockwell setting... Small Crimes is a strong piece of work, lean and spare, but muscular where a noir novel should be, with a strong central character whom we alternately admire and despise -- Ed Siegel * Boston Globe * There's a new name to add to the pantheon of the sons and daughters of Cain: Dave Zeltserman. His new novel, Small Crimes, is ingeniously twisted and imbued with a glossy coating of black humor... The plot of Small Crimes ricochets out from [its] claustrophobic opening, and it's a thing of sordid beauty -- Maureen Corrigan * NPR's Best Books of 2008 * Small Crimes is one of the finest dark suspense novels I've read in the past few years * Ed Gorman * Small Crimes has plenty of crime, but obsession, hurbris, and evil, pure and impure, are at the heart of this vivid noir * Booklist * A dark masterpiece * Crimespree Magazine * Zeltserman masterfully controls the action, offering dark noir fiction in the best Jim Thompson tradition * Lansing State Journal * The characterisation and mental torment are reminiscent of the insightful psychological thrillers of Jim Thompson. Stunning stuff * Tangled Web * ...an explosive Molotov cocktail of a book. This is a dark shocker, a downward spiral of violence, betrayal, manipulation and tragic misunderstanding * The Weekender, South Africa *