HARRY WHITTINGTON – A Ticket to Hell. Gold Medal 862, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1959. Black Lizard, paperback, 1987.

   Ric Durazo, a man with a past (as we eventually find out), driving through the New Mexico desert in a brand new Porsche, is also a man on a mission, with a job to do. We don’t don’t know that for sure, but we can sense it. On a whim he picks up a young boy hitch-hiking. The young kid pulls a gun on him. Ric slows the car to 35 and dumps the kid out of the car, and he drives on.

   Stopping at a motel, perhaps one prearranged, he spots a man across the way about to kill his wife by faking an accidental gas leak in their room. The man goes off in his car. Ric saves the girl. Can he convince her to call the cops? No. To call her father? No. For whatever reason fate wills it, and feminine unreason, the two of them seem to be permanently tied to the other.

   In the meantime he has a job to do, and $250,000 in the trunk of his car has something to do with it. He beats up the husband and takes it on the lam, with the cops hot on his trail, high up into the mountains, Eve still with him. And did I mention that he still has a job to do?

   If you like your crime fiction to have a pace that never slackens, never slows down for a minute, not even once, look no further. The more you read, the faster you will go. Guaranteed.