Suitcase City Paperback – March 3, 2015

Pharmaceutical executive guy walks into a bar.Bartender serves exec four / five bourbons.Exec goes to the Gents room.Fight breaks out.Exec gets the better of the other guy.An unfortunate turn of events for exec.Suitcase City, Sterling Watson’s seventh novel, once again showcases master storytelling. The exotic setting, especially the steamy Floridian nights, has shades of Beasts of the Southern Wild. Watson's sentences, never reliant on overused and endless repetition, snap off the page enhancing the book’s silken movement. Slight disclosure: an eyes-peeking-through-fingers revulsion scene may startle, but its execution allows readers to absorb it and move onward with minimal magnitude even while reading late into the night.The story opens in Cedar Key Florida, 1978 where Jimmy Teach tends bar to earn some money while he rehabilitates from his freefall after leaving professional football. Starting over is tough. Enter Bloodworth Naylor (Blood) with a tempting business opportunity involving Guatemalans, and then fast forward to 1997.Teach is now a vice president of sales at a pharmaceutical company in Tampa and recent widower with loyal teenaged daughter. Besides his role as single parent, where he is his most tender, his primary extracurricular activities include drinking at remote bars and telling Gator glory day quarterback stories to whomever is in earshot.Tension builds as readers learn of Teach and Blood’s shared past—a tale he has never disclosed, not even to his dead wife. Eventually the two men also share beautiful honey-skinned Thalia, a mysterious woman who works at the country club where Teach is a member while Blood is in jail. (Poor Blood. She doesn’t wait for him.)“I knew you when you came in my first day.”“Ah.’ Teach understood now. He said it with newsreel drama: ‘You mean you recognized Teach, the Gridiron Great?’”“Naw, not him. I recognized Jimmy the shirttail cracker from up that oyster-shell road in Cedar Key.”Thalia has been in the shadows of his story all along. Can I have a witness? She smells of home to him. He’s irrepressibly drawn to her. They experience deep passion for each other with ghastly consequences that Teach might have been able to avoid, but like Ti Noël in Carpentier’s, The Kingdom of This World, Teach returns “…like the eel to the mud from which it was spawned…”Released from jail, Blood retakes control. His sense of righteousness is seductive. Blood is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Teach looks the part of the perfect citizen then shapeshifts. He is a tragically submerged hero, synthesizing past and present, stringing back and forth under the surface as in a game of cat’s cradle.Suitcase City grips with its multiple tightly-wrought subplots swirling in full rotation around Blood’s unrelenting hunt of Teach. Teach, a likable guy, is a jovial storyteller who simplifies relationships by keeping them superficial. Homeostasis is his preferred state but it’s not to be. His charm is infectious and maybe he should be spared; still, the reader is faced with chronic discomfort over some of Teach’s choices and wonders if Teach deserves to catch a break after all.Sterling Watson is the co-author, with Dennis Lehane, of the screenplay Bad Blood. BothSterling Watson and Dennis Lehane are co-creators of the annual Writers inParadise conference in Florida, which boasts a star-studded faculty includingAndre Dubus III, Ann Hood, Laura Lippman, Les Standiford, Jess Walter, and more.2015 will mark the 12th year of the conference, which Watson directs.

Once, I could read long esoteric novels with meandering plots. Sadly, I've become a product of the technological age and feel my attention span has diminished to amoeba size. With all the distractions of life and media vying for my attention, Suitcase City drew me in and had me up at night turning pages until the end. Watson builds suspense by using multiple points of view, which is sometimes a transparent literary device. Yet in Suitcase City, the various characters' perspectives are startlingly authentic and rendered flawlessly through each character's distinctive voice without a trace of author intrusion. Even though Watson was an academic for thirty plus years, you will not find the prose of a pontificating professor anywhere in this novel. Suitcase City is raw hard-boiled noir, which paradoxically illuminates a loving father-daughter bond at the heart of a violent and vengeful tale. I believe Elmore Leonard would have admired this novel and Watson for his no nonsense storytelling. And I'm grateful for a solid, well told, suspense novel that didn't make me feel like I have ADD!

Bravo to the author. A fast-moving plot-driven novel that holds the reader from the first page until the end. Watson is a master of building tension with wonderful descriptive paragraphs that illustration his skill of the written word. I’m not one who usually gets caught up in crime novels, but this has a unique twist that kept me guessing and told a good story without need of offensive language and gruesome violence. Thank you, Mr. Watson, for showing us that good novels can be written about a darker side of life without showering every other page with four letter words.

Suitcase City is a great story based in Florida in the 1970s and 1990s. The central character, Jimmy Teach, is a Cedar Key home town boy who succeeds as a University of Florida football player, but brings on his own downfall due to bad decisions, mainly involving drugs and alcohol. The story picks up twenty years later in Suitcase City, a seedy section of Tampa. Teach has once again risen to success, this time with all the money and social standing he could want. But will more bad decisions bring him down again? Sterling Watson has written a character-driven book that has Florida locales jumping off the page. Suitcase City will keep you reading, wanting to know what will happen next. I hope there will be a sequel soon.

I had never heard of this author before it appeared as a recommendation on Amazon. Solid story, a few too many convenient conclusions and happenings but overall a good story, although after the first 20 pages it slows down for the next 30 or so pages and you may wonder where is this book going? Don't worry it all ties in together at the end.

The worst thing about writing this review is that I have to publicly admit that I read this book. Probably the worst crime story I have ever read. I wish I could rate it zero stars; however, it gets 1 star as the first 120 pages were actually pretty decent and could have potentially been a great story if expanded. Seriously, dont bother with this. If you want an amazing crime story, read The Dry by Jane Harper

Started out with a good premise for an engaging story but steadily went terribly wrong. Will never trust anything with a Hiaasin name attached again.

I was attracted to get this book because I am from Tampa so that makes for more 'relational 'reading. The author paints very good visual pictures and I enjoyed the writing style.Overall a good read!

Wow, this book was so corny and poorly written that I just couldn't subject myself to the self-abuse that was reading it any further. I'm generally not a quitter, but it was making me miserable. Maybe this is a genre that people like, maybe it's supposed to be ironic or something, clearly I didn't get it. This may sit alongside a bunch of great reviews and, if that's the case, I'd expect you to write off this review; if you go for it and get beyond "squwaaark" then I salute your stating power!