by Harold Robbins
Within the first few pages of Harold Robbins's latest and final novel—completed shortly before his death last year—his hero, Jerry Cooper, has lost both parents in a car wreck and has had a steamy sexual encounter with a girl downstairs. The Predators keeps up this breathless pace, tracking Cooper from Manhattan, where he works for his uncle, a small-time crook, to Paris during World War II. There, Cooper gets involved with a Corsican gangster who traffics in smuggled cars. Robbins doesn't waste time on niceties of style or subtleties of characterization as he follows Cooper's rise to power and respectability. There's something quaintly old-fashioned about this no-frills potboiler and something distasteful in its tired, one-dimensional takes on homosexuals, African-Americans and endlessly compliant women. (Forge, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Robbins's last, a crude stew of sex and money
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