The title has a suitably dying fall, as Higgins passed away in 1999. His first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, came out in 1972, and the next 24 sought unavailingly to surpass or even equal its brilliance. By a strange twist of fate, this present, and last one, does approach the high standard of the first. Again set in the underworld of Boston city, its main feature is the idiosyncratic use of dialogue, almost incomprehensible at times but most probably highly accurate. As in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the protagonist is merely a featured player, but one struggling to get out from under the double burden of working for gangsters, while at the same time being pressurised into giving them up to the forces of law and order. Roscob is an ex-accountant who has done time for grand larceny, and can now only find a job collecting protection money for the mob. Around him gyrate an ill-assorted group of characters: crooks, cops, FBI men on the make, all of them operating their own agendas. In the end, our unlikely hero approaches a kind of shabby nobility, still alive but with his own sword of Damocles suspended above him. A posthumous word of approbation, then, for our author, for attaining the heights one more time.