A Dance at the Slaughterhouse: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block Narrated by Joe Barrett

Overview

There is no accolade or major mystery award that has not already been bestowed upon Lawrence Block. His acclaimed crime novels are as intelligent, provocative, and emotionally complex as they are nerve-tighteningly intense. And perhaps the most respected of his myriad works are the Matthew Scudder books-masterworks of suspenseful invention featuring a remarkable protagonist rich in conscience and character, with all the flaws that his humanity entails. This is the detective novel as high art.

In Matt Scudder's mind, money, power, and position elevate nobody above morality or the law. Now the ex-cop and unlicensed PI has been hired to prove that socialite Richard Thurman orchestrated the brutal murder of his beautiful, pregnant wife. During Scudder's hard-drinking years, he left a piece of his soul on every seedy corner of the Big Apple. But this case is more depraved and more potentially devastating than anything he experienced while floundering in the urban depths. Because this investigation is leading Scudder on a frightening grand tour of New York's sex-for-sale underworld-where an innocent young life is simply a commodity to be bought and perverted ... and then destroyed.

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review

Shocking ... darkly entertaining ... This one has more voltage than most.

Detroit News

Block and Scudder never set a foot wrong on New York's cracked, grimy sidewalks.

Chicago Tribune

Outstanding ... a smoothly paced, deftly plotted, brightly phrased study of perversity and coincidence with many twists and no straight arrows.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this pitch-perfect crime story, now-sober Manhattan PI Matt Scudder--seen last in A Ticket to the Boneyard --embarks on a personal mission as he investigates the death of the wife of TV producer Richard Thurman. Amanda Thurman was sexually assaulted and murdered during a robbery in which her husband was injured. Hired by Amanda's brother, who suspects his brother-in-law of complicity in the murder, Scudder tails the producer to a boxing match where he notices another man whom he believes he saw on tape a few months earlier on a different case involving a snuff film. Although he finally connects Thurman with the masked players in the film (a chilling husband and wife who quote Nietzsche with ``New Age gloss''), Scudder can't provide enough evidence for prosecuting either the taped killing or Amanda's murder. Sticking with the case, Scudder explores New York's sex-for-sale industry, calls on such old drinking friends as cop Joe Durkin and criminal Mick Ballou, and attends AA meetings at all hours of the day, all over the city as Block masterfully builds the pressure that leads Scudder to the violent resolution. In his eight earlier appearances, Scudder has been a copy, an unrelenting drinker, a family man; his evolution in Block's series, fraught with ambiguity, is as convincing as a real life. Author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Unlicensed New York investigator and series protagonist Matthew Scudder seeks to determine if a cable television producer raped and murdered his own wealthy wife. At the same time, Scudder hunts for a brutal man who makes video ``snuff'' tapes involving teenage boys and a leather-dressed woman. The two cases merge, of course, as Scudder enlists the aid of his motley assortment of interesting friends. This strong cast of supporting characters, along with a riveting plot and forceful prose, place this on the high priority list. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/91.

Detroit News

Block and Scudder never set a foot wrong on New York’s cracked, grimy sidewalks.”

Booklist

Strong stuff from a real pro.”

Chicago Tribune

Outstanding…A smoothly paced, deftly plotted, brightly phrased study of perversity and coincidence with many twists and no straight arrows.”

New York Times

Darkly entertaining…Shocking…This one has more voltage than most.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169836714
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/15/2014
Series:	Matthew Scudder Series , #9
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Midway into the fifth round the kid in the blue trunks rocked his opponent with a solid left to the jaw. He followed it with a straight right to the head.

"He's ready to fall," Mick Ballou said.

He looked it, too, but when the kid in blue waded in the other boy slipped a punch and groped his way into a clinch. I got a look at his eyes before the referee stepped between the two fighters. They looked glazed, unfocused.

"How much time is there?"

"More than a minute."

"Plenty of time," Mick said. "Watch your man take the lad right out. For a small man he's strong as a bull."

They weren't that small. Junior middleweights, which I guess would put them somewhere around 155 pounds. I used to know the weight limits for all the classes, but it was easy then. Now they've got more than twice as many classifications, with junior this and super that, and three different governing bodies each recognizing a different champion. I think the trend must have started when someone figured out that it was easier to promote a title bout, and it's getting to the point where you rarely see anything else.

The card we were watching, however, was strictly nontitle, and a long way removed from the glamour and showmanship of championship fights staged in Vegas and Atlantic City casinos. We were, to be precise, in a concrete-block shed on a dark street in Maspeth, an industrial wasteland in the borough of Queens bordered on the south and west by the Greenpoint and Bushwick sections of Brooklyn and set off from the rest of Queens by a half-circle of cemeteries. You could live a lifetime in New York without ever getting to Maspeth, oryou could drive through it dozens of times without knowing it. With its warehouses and factories and drab residential streets, Maspeth's not likely to be on anybody's short list for potential gentrification, but I suppose you never know. Sooner or later they'll run out of other places, and the crumbling warehouses will be reborn as artists' lofts while young urban homesteaders rip the rotted asphalt siding from the row houses and set about gutting the interiors. You'll have ginkgo trees lining the sidewalk on Grand Avenue, and a Korean greengrocer on every comer.

For now, though, the New Maspeth Arena was the only sign I'd seen of the neighborhood's glorious future. Some months earlier Madison Square Garden had closed the Felt Forum for renovations, and sometime in early December the New Maspeth Arena had opened with a card of boxing matches every Thursday night, with the first prelim getting under way around seven.

The building was smaller than the Felt Forum, and had a no-frills feel to it, with untrimmed concrete-block walls and a sheet-metal roof and a poured concrete slab for a floor. It was rectangular in shape, and the boxing ring stood in the center of one of the long walls, opposite the entrance doors. Rows of metal folding chairs framed the ring's three open sides. The chairs were gray, except for the first two rows in each of the three sections, which were blood red. The red seats at ringside were reserved. The rest of the arena was open seating, and a seat was only five dollars, which was two dollars less than the price of a first-run movie in Manhattan. Even so, almost half of the gray chairs remained unoccupied.

The price was low in order to fill as many of the seats as possible, so that the fans who watched the fights on cable TV wouldn't realize the event had been staged solely on their behalf. The New Maspeth Arena was a cable phenomenon, thrown up to furnish programming for FBCS, Five Borough Cable Sportscasts, the latest sports channel trying to get a toehold in the New York metro area. The FBCS trucks had been parked outside when Mick and I arrived a few minutes after seven, and at eight o'clock their coverage began.

Now the fifth round of the final prelim fight was ending with the boy in the white trunks still on his feet. Both fighters were black, both local kids from Brooklyn, one introduced as hailing from Bedford-Stuyvesant, the other from Crown Heights. Both had short haircuts and regular features, and they were the same height, although the kid in blue looked shorter in the ring because he fought in a crouch. It's good their trunks were different colors or it would have been tough to tell them apart.

"He should have had him there," Mick said. "The other lad was ready to go and he couldn't finish him."

"The boy in the white has heart," I said.

"He was glassy-eyed. What's his name, the one in blue?" He looked at the program, a single sheet of blue paper with the bouts listed. "McCann," he said. "McCann let him off the hook."

"He was all over him."

"He was, and punching away at him, but he couldn't pull the trigger. There's a lot of them like that, they get their man in trouble and then they can't put him down. I don't know why it is."

"He's got three rounds left."

Mick shook his head. "He had his chance," he said.

He was right. McCann won the remaining three rounds handily, but the fight was never closer to a knockout than it had been in the fifth. At the final bell they clung together briefly in a sweaty embrace, and then McCann bopped over to his corner with his gloves raised in triumph. The judges agreed with him. Two of them had him pitching a shutout, while the third man had the kid in white winning a round.

“I'll get a beer,” Mick said. “Will you...”

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse. Copyright © by Lawrence Block. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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