Girl Can't Help It: A Thriller

by Max Allan Collins, Dan John Miller (Read by)

Overview

A rock band’s reunion is looking more like a farewell tour in a captivating mystery by New York Times bestselling and award-winning crime master Max Allan Collins.

No sooner do Hot Rod and the Pistons reunite for their induction into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, than two band members take a final bow. Both alleged suicides. A tragic way to go out. A bum way for one-hit wonders to be remembered. But it’s Labor Day weekend. The show must go on.

With replacements at the ready, the Pistons are back on home turf to headline the first ever Rock and Country Music Fest. Police Chief Krista Larson and her father, Keith, are there listening. And watching. Because they suspect there may be more to the band members’ untimely deaths than anyone else can see.

As Krista and Keith navigate the investigation, a dark picture of the band’s rocky history begins to take center stage. As betrayal, revenge, and blackmail start playing out in the present, the father-daughter team fear that this encore may be the band’s finale.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978683020
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Series:	Krista Larson , #2
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

After earning the Eye, the PWA’s Lifetime Achievement award in 2006, Max Allan Collins was named a Grand Master in 2017 by the Mystery Writers of America. He’s earned an unprecedented twenty-three Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award nominations, winning two for his Nathan Heller novels. Those novels also earned Collins the PWA’s Hammer award for making a major contribution to the private-eye genre. His other books include the New York Times bestseller Saving Private Ryan, the USA TODAY bestselling CSI series, and Girl Most Likely in the Krista Larson series.

His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award–winning Tom Hanks film, and is followed by two acclaimed prose sequels and several more graphic novels in the same series. His comics credits include Dick Tracy, Wild Dog, Batman, and Ms. Tree.

Collins is also a screenwriter, playwright, and a leading indie filmmaker in his native Iowa, where he lives with his wife, writer Barbara Collins. As “Barbara Allan,” they have collaborated on fourteen novels. For more information, visit www.maxallancollins.com.

Editorial Reviews

02/03/2020

When Hot Rod and the Pistons, an ’80s rock cover band, learn they will be inducted into the Iowa Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in MWA Grand Master Collins’s unimpressive sequel to 2019’s Girl Most Likely, a reunion concert is scheduled in Galena, Ill. The Pistons reunion provides an old follower a chance to exact revenge for something terrible the band did to her back in 1984—something a Piston captured on film. Angel Baby, as she was nicknamed back in the day, parties with one of the band members after the show and poisons him with an untraceable drug. She then steals his copy of the tape and makes the death look like a suicide. But as Angel Baby continues to poison the band members one by one, Galena police chief Krista Larson becomes suspicious and decides to enlist the aid of her retired police detective father, who used to be the band’s roadie. Though the killings are staged skillfully enough, the dull characters (including Krista), endless references to rock history, and bland prose combine to flatline the story. By the time the action picks up late in the book, readers will have already tuned out. Collins’s fans can take a pass on this one. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

In this follow-up to Girl Most Likely (2019), Collins, bestselling author of Road to Perdition (1998) and multiple crime series, nails the vernacular of the music world as well as the ambitions of small timers who never came to terms with their failure to realize big-time dreams.” —Booklist

“Max Allan Collins crafts a fine thriller with characters you can’t help but like. This series will hook you, guaranteed. Pick up Girl Can't Help It, settle in for a few hours of thrilling escape and try to figure out whodunit. I dare you.” —Bookreporter

“…the Larsons second outing is as much a pleasure as was the first and once again we find ourselves clamoring for more.” —Pulp Fiction Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-12-09
The reunion of Hot Rod and the Pistons on the occasion of their induction into the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame is blighted by a woman who seems determined to reduce their numbers to the vanishing point.

Back in the 1980s, lots of band members did lots of foolish things, some of them immoral and downright vicious. At least one member of the Pistons, lead guitarist Rick Jonsen, did something so terrible to one female groupie nicknamed Angel Baby that when she finds out after the reunion concert that it was captured on videotape, she feeds Rick a fatal dose of succinylcholine and grabs the tape. A year later, back in the band's hometown of Galena, Illinois, rhythm guitarist Danny Davies indicates that he shot the offending video, and minutes after he makes a thinly disguised blackmail pitch, he meets the same fate, this time disguised to look like a suicide. Since the two deaths took place so far apart in time and space, no one suspects anything except for Galena Police Chief Krista Larson (Girl Most Likely, 2017), who goes so far as to engage her father, retired Dubuque homicide detective Keith Larson, as a consultant. As if in response to her suspicions, another party emerges to attempt blackmail on such remarkably similar terms that you'd think the would-be extortionists had been issued the same instruction manual—one that must have been seriously defective, since this one ends up equally dead. Faced with the very real possibility that Rodney Penniston and the rest of the Pistons will soon be no more than a memory, Krista and her dad hunker down and manage to stop Angel Baby seconds before another homicidal act on an even grander scale.

The primacy of music over mystery makes this one mainly for rockabilly fans.

Kirkus Reviews