If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King

A young, handsome, impressionable sailor is groomed for murder in this classic 1930s noir.

A whopper of a front-cover spoiler steals the mystery from King’s short thriller.

How much more would I have enjoyed this thriller if the identity of the villain wasn’t gloriously revealed on the front cover? Whenever the characters sat around smoking cigarettes and wondering who on earth could have dunnit, the reader rolls their eyes and waits for the lady in the slinky dress. What were Penguin thinking? Rita Hayworth does make a show-stopping cover, but this is at expensive of the reader’s full enjoyment of King’s story.

Laurence Planter is a bit of a bimbo: young, sculptured, handsome, and naive. He takes a job as a chauffeur and gets coerced into a hare-brained murder plot billed as the perfect crime. Laurence thinks he can bluff his way out of the spiderweb, until all too quickly he realises he’s caught in the trap. But who’s the spider? What’s the game?

I loved the rats in the ruins scene.

At less than 150 pages, this is a short, often tense thriller of double-crossings, money, and power. The stranglehold increases during the finale as Laurence’s chances of escape dwindle.

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