Jackpot, by Bill Pronzini

[shannon_a]

Events of recent weeks led me to look for some light reading, thus I picked up the next Nameless Detective novel, Jackpot.

It was a pretty good detective story. Nameless sets out to discover why someone committed suicide right after earning a $200,000 jackpot and ends up scouring California for clues. There's enough good detective work in here, with Nameless finding different info from different people and putting it all together, that I was tempted to steal the framework for an RPG adventure. However, Kingmaker, my current campaign, doesn't really call for that sort of thing, so I let it be.

The most interesting element of the book was that Nameless realizes that he's really changed after the ordeal of his last book (where he was taken captive for 3 months and left for dead). He's more paranoid and angrier, but perhaps more notably, he's willing to cut corners and go outside the law, which he never has before. Pronzini correctly makes that change the crux of the book's plotting, and I found it very interesting to read.