Hooligans — AND — Sharky's Machine

Jake Kilmer is on a mission. A mission to tidy up his hometown. It won't be easy, he's got the mob to contend with, the Dunetown Police department and a few vigilante's thrown in for good measure. The characters in this book bring the pages to life with wonderful nicknames such as "The Stick, Kite, and my personal favourite, "Charlie one ear Flowers." Diehl has completed a unique, thought provoking thriller, and you don't mind the odd occasion when he climbs on his soap box and pontificates, after all he's talking sense.

I've tried for an hour to get the best part of this novel across, and I can't seem to put it in words. It's not the intriguing plot, or the perfectly lush yet cool setting. It's not the brilliant dialogue. It's not even the characters really, although that's where it stems from. The best part of this book is the toughness of it's main character, Jake Kilmer. But it's much more than that, too. It's the soft underside he lets slip through at times. It's handled so adeptly by Diehl that it's barely noticable. But you feel it. The thing that sets this novel apart from others of its genre goes beyond those things mentioned above. The back-story makes this a novel you start to love a quarter of the way through. This is a masculine, brutal novel, but it's underlying sadness gives it a true greatness. I've read most of Diehl's other novels in hopes of finding that again. It just isnt' there. This one is special.

Here Diehl tears into one of his pet peeves: real estate developers who ravage the land for profit. He has seen the devastation of their work on his own beloved St. Simons Island, Georgia. It is the subject that always brings out his soap box and he does it mighty justice in HOOLIGANS. Jake Kilmer, of the Federal Racket Squad, is shocked when he returns to Dunetown after a 20-year absence. Here, "..a dark, romantic two-lane blacktop, an archway of magnolias dripping with Spanish moss, that meandered from Duneway to the sea..." has become "...a six-lane highway that slashed between an infinity of garish streetlights like a scar." The Norman Rockwell painting is now a Christo travesty in neon. To worsen the pot, someone is diligently engaged in offing the local Mob. Then there's Kilmer's arch enemy, Turk Nance, and Kilmer's obsession with the woman he had loved and lost. As the story advances, interspersed with portions of a soldier's diary of Nam war experiences, tension mounts and the situation becomes ever more mysterious and dangerous.If you've read any of William Diehl's books you know you've found another winner. Vivid prose and spirited characters intent on their mission pulls the reader into a riveting story that moves and twists faster than lightning between storm clouds. Saddle up a Diehl book and hang on -- you're in for the ride of your life.

this book is no doubt set in my home town of savannah georgia. the author did a great bit of homework for this one. i feel it is fiction based on fact, going by my study of the history of this fair city.the personal side of this book makes you feel you are jake kilmer and you really feel for the guy it is an awesome book, but sometime the detailed names of the characters can confuse you that is its only weakness. if you can call attention to detail a weakness. all in all a fantastic easily read book

i found this book to be as thrilling as any other Diehl work, complete with a comprehensive plot, charectars that seem more real and human than your next door neighbor, and Diehl's great way with words. The action is non-stop, and keeps the pages turning. Just when you think you've figured out what's going on, the plot twists, defying your assumptions. When it finally ended, i wasn't sure whether to be sad that it was over, or happy that i knew what happened.