Dope Thief by Dennis Tafoya

by Dennis Tafoya
(Doylestown, PA)

Written with an unflinching awareness of lives doomed by poverty and crime, and told with an elegiac literary power, Dennis Tafoya’s debut novel DOPE THIEF (Minotaur Books, May 5th, $24.95) is an astounding, hard-to-put-down work of crime literature.

Along with his friend Manny, small-time criminal Ray makes a decent living posing as a DEA agent and robbing drug dealers in the decaying neighborhoods surrounding Philadelphia. Heading further afield, they raid a meth lab in a farmhouse, and end up scoring hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ray and Manny soon discover that the farmhouse was part of a much larger operation, and a wannabe drug kingpin is determined to make them pay.

For Ray, the situation is a wake-up call; he needs to get out of his life of drugs and crime right away. Yet this isn’t the first time he’s tried to go straight. Ray is haunted by the memory of a girlfriend from high school, a girl he would have done anything for, whose death left him stuck in the life of a criminal. Now Ray has to stay alive long enough to discover if that path is truly irreversible.

Becoming much larger than the tale of a botched scam, Ray’s journey toward a redemption that is never within easy reach takes surprising turns. DOPE THIEF is a tale as compelling and expertly-crafted as the novels of James Lee Burke and Richard Price, and it announces the arrival of a promising new talent.

Reviews of Dope Thief:

“Dope Thief is first-rate literary noir, the hardest core crime novel I’ve read this year. It manages to be funny without ever descending into the trivial, and at its core it’s harrowing. An amazingly assured debut by Dennis Tafoya, a writer I know I’ll be following for years to come.” —Scott Phillips, author of Cottonwood

“Dope Thief is one of those first novels that scream for us to pay attention to an important new voice in crime fiction. Dennis Tafoya writes a fast, quirky, and thoroughly twisted tale of corruption, heroism, and redemption that will leave its mark on you.” —Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Patient Zero

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Ray, the 30-year-old protagonist of Tafoya’s raw and redemptive debut, is a sure bet loser. His mother’s dead, his abusive father in prison. His own lengthy record includes car theft, burglary and a two-year jail stint. For the past year, Ray and his buddy Manny have been robbing dope dealers and meth labs in the Philadelphia area. Ray and Manny hit small operations disguised as DEA agents, knowing their victims can’t go to the cops and don’t have the resources to come after them. Inevitably, a job goes bad, resulting in gunshots and death. With too much money at stake and serious bad guys on his trail, Ray realizes that the criminal phase of his life is over. Tafoya gradually reveals pieces of Ray’s past while detailing his increasingly desperate efforts to rid himself of those dogging him and threatening anyone connected to him. A boy “born into the life” makes a wrenching attempt to change course or die trying in a first novel that marks Tafoya as a writer to watch.

Kirkus Reviews:

A young ex-con struggles for a better life even though he knows the odds are against him.
Ever since childhood, Ray’s been convinced he’s basically worthless. “We’re just a couple of low-lifes,” says his best friend Manny. “Guys like us…we get locked up, we get killed…we knew it going in.” Juvie and the state pen are already part of Ray’s short history, and his future is grimly predictable. Still, Ray and Manny have moments when they think they are pretty slick. Over time they’ve developed a specialty con, pretending to be DEA guys in order to rip off carefully selected drug dealers. By keeping the targets small and the take modest, they reduce retaliation to a manageable risk—until the day it isn’t. Quite by accident, and to their horror, they connect with a six-figure score. This kind of money, they know, will be missed by people determined to retrieve it. As a result of these people’s efforts, a severely injured Ray winds up in the hospital, where he makes a last-ditch effort to rethink his life. “You can’t be better than you are,” his deadbeat father has always insisted. But there’s a young woman who keeps telling him he can be.
An impressive debut by a writer savvy enough to understand that the way to a reader’s heart is often as not through flawed characters.


Booklist:
Ray and Manny, flashing bogus badges and wearing DEA windbreakers purchased at a “flea market in Jersey,” take down small drug dealers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It’s easy and lucrative, but they know it can’t last: “Everyone was high. Everyone was stupid. Everyone had guns.” Reality, in the form of New England bikers trying to muscle into the Philadelphia–New Jersey drug trade, rears its head quickly, and Ray and Manny are on the run. But that’s only half of this fine first novel. An abusive, criminal father and a number of jail stints beginning in high school seem to have doomed Ray to relive his father’s sordid life, but Ray is a bright man looking for a shot at redemption. When it comes, redemption is both unlikely and interesting. Tafoya is off to a promising start: Ray and a number of other characters are quirky and engaging. The locale of Bucks County, which ranges from city gritty to bucolic beauty, works well. The plotting is solid, and the action has a hard, violent edge that recalls Richard Price.
— Thomas Gaughan

You can contact the author and read more about the book at:
www.dennistafoya.com
email: dennis.tafoya@yahoo.com

Thanks very much!