There He Was...

The Butcher's fifth Pinnacle novel is a particularly weird one. In Stuart Jason's DEADLY DEAL, White Hat sics the Butcher on a mobster named Leo Lucho, who is stockpiling the world's platinum inside an abandoned mine shaft near Turnip Green, Kentucky. Lucho plans to blow up the mine, which he believes will then make him Premier of the United States of America.

Bucher becomes involved, initially, in an effort to find an Native American woman named Noma Kiva, a missing witness to Lucho's assassination of a Syndicate rival. During his search for Noma, the Butcher becomes aware of Lucho's oddball plot.

Apparently written by James Dockery using the Stuart Jason house name, DEADLY DEAL continues the trend of earlier Butcher novels of describing all Mafia employees as repugnant physically as they are cruel and perverted. Dockery's mobsters are all dimwitted or homosexual or limping or fat or scarred. It makes one wonder how the Mob could have gotten so powerful.

Plenty of location-hopping, rough action, and brisk pacing makes DEADLY DEAL an adequately filling Butcher adventure.