I have read most of Swain's Tony Valentine series and enjoy them a lot. Swain apparently knows the gambling and grifting business cold and it shows in the stories. Midnight Rambler is a departure from that knowledge set, I think. His protagonist is an ex-cop who got thrown off the force for beating up a suspect. He specializes in finding missing persons, especially children. He has Bruno, a dog to provide some comic relief. It's a good story but the detail doesn't ring as authentic as his grifter series. I was listening to this book while driving and every now and again would mutter, "you stupid son-of-a-bitch."I have this thing about self-righteous vigilantes, for that's what our "hero" is. He has this obsession with finding lost children and he's good at it, but there are a couple of scenes where, rather than call the authorities, who have the manpower and resources to fix things right, he insists on taking the law into his own hands, all the while treating us to a discourse on why he can do things better, yada yada yada. The end result is that he is forced to kill one of the chief bad guys before getting information they desperately need to save a girl who has been kidnapped and is being tortured. They can see it happening on the screen, and they learn the location, but do they call in the cavalry? Nope, gotta do it themselves. Foolish, stupid and self-righteous.
Nevertheless, I'll give it a couple of stars for an intriguing and unusual plot in which the bad guys employ centralized order taking at a McDonald's to target their victims.
