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Bill Pronzini
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The Crimes of Jordan Wise: A Novel Hardcover – June 27, 2006

by Bill Pronzini (Author)
3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 21 ratings
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Jordan Wise is a mild-mannered accountant with a large San Francisco
engineering firm in the late 1970s. By his own admission, the first
thirty-four years of his life were dull, empty. But that all changes
when he meets and falls in love with Annalise Bonner, an ambitious
young woman who craves excitement, a life on the edge.

With her as the catalyst, Wise concocts and executes a meticulous
plan to steal more than half a million dollars from his firm. They
escape to the Virgin Islands, but their plans to live a life of quiet
luxury are beset by unexpected pitfalls -- and Wise is forced to
carry out two more ingenious schemes as a result. All three of his
crimes are perfect -- or are they?

THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE is a classic tale of love, greed, betrayal,
and violence told with Bill Pronzini's characteristic twists and
turns and his special brand of suspense. It is also a powerful
psychological examination of a man, a woman, and the wages of sin.

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Walker Books
  4. Publication date
    June 27, 2006
  5. Dimensions
    6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0802714935
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0802714930
  8. See all details
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The Amazon Book Review
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Three perfect crimes, each with its own special savor, but each ruled by the cool calculation of a cautious, bespectacled numbers cruncher whose brush with a femme fatale awakens his heart and his dark side. Set largely in the sultry Virgin Islands, where our embezzler and his girl abscond after the first perfect crime, Pronzini's latest deftly plotted thriller unfolds with the methodical poise of his antihero and with the mesmerizing inevitability of Greek tragedy. Like Domenic Stansberry's -Edgar-winning vThe Confession (2004), Pronzini's many stand-alones (including In an Evil Time, 2001, and Step to the Graveyard Easy, 2002) recall the lean, classic noir of Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis, and their relative dearth of grit, grime, and profanity makes them a great recommendation for a wide range of suspense readers. Pronzini's Nameless Detective series gets more attention, but his stand-alones are every bit as essential to most library crime-fiction collections. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Bill Pronzini is the author of sixty six novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, the novelist Marcia Muller, and is the creator of the popular Nameless Detective series. A six-time nominee for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (most recently for A Wasteland of Strangers). Pronzini is also the recipient of three Shamus Awards. He lives in Northern California.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Walker Books; First Edition (June 27, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802714935
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802714930
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 21 ratings

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Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini

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Customer reviews

3.3 out of 5 stars
3.3 out of 5
21 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Joseph Lynn
3.0 out of 5 stars A Good Story, Awkward Reading Due to Typos
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2016
Verified Purchase
A decent read. The plot is interesting, and I found myself turning the Kindle pages quickly in some parts, which is a good sign. Some of the details of the mechanics of sailing slow the pace down a bit, but overall it's okay.

That said, I want to warn potential readers that whoever transferred this to a digital copy was very careless with the results: the word "caught" is consistently spelled "cought" several dozen times throughout the book, and we get phrases like "it's all Ues" for "It's all lies" and "dalighter" instead of "daughter." It's also anticlimactic that the penultimate chapter of the book ends with the words "End of the Une" instead of "End of the line." Whoever transferred this needs to update their OCR software.

A good summertime read.
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Q. Kelly
4.0 out of 5 stars What Makes a Perfect Murder?
Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2012
I've always wondered if a perfect murder counts if the killer feels compelled to dish all-and then actually dishes all. (For what is probably my favorite "perfect" murder book, check out Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None.")

Anyway, this book I'm reviewing is "The Crimes of Jordan Wise" by Bill Pronzini. It's a pretty good perfect-murder book. The protagonist, Jordan Wise, starts with a totally different perfect crime, embezzling. The writing, in first person point of view, is smooth, engaging and accessible. It also caused me to wonder if a perfect crime is really perfect if it wreaks an emotional toll on the killer. What exactly is a perfect crime? Some people think a perfect murder is one in which people don't know a death, or a crime, even occurred. This seems to be Jordan Wise's school of thought.

Is a murder perfect if one person finds out but never tells the cops? Again, I guess this depends on individual definitions of perfect. Jordan's definition seems to shift often, and I don't think he realizes it. Maybe the point of the book is that no crime can be perfect.

All in all, I definitely recommend this book. I read the ebook version, which apparently had conversion issues from the print version. Namely, the issues are with many letter "u"s and letters "li." If the print book was scanned for ebook, the program probably saw many "li"s as "u"s. This was not a huge deal to me and made for some entertaining new words. However, it boggles me to think no one would bother to do a simple scan/proofread of the ebook.
One person found this helpful
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RueRue
3.0 out of 5 stars Beware of multiple typos
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2016
A nice little noir tale. Unfortunately the Kindle edition has many, many typos, distracting from the flow of the prose.
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Robert www.fogcityfog.com
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't revisit the scene of this crime
Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2008
A boring methodical criminal is like a boring methodical airplane pilot: effective in real life but not fun to read about.

Jordan's ability to plot and execute "perfect crimes" is supposedly because of his skill at math and reducing planning his crimes to "equations." This sounds good unless you know anything about math, in which case you realize that nothing Jordan is doing has anything to do with math and, as the character himself admits late in the book, the crimes are more like project management exercises. The whole "equations" thing is a ridiculous pretension to appeal to the math snobs who read crime novels and probably to the writer's professor friends who also know nothing about math or any other kind of honest work, for that matter.

There is unintentional hilarity in the second half of the book as the homosexual subtext between Jordan and the dignified black guy gets thicker and more powerful (if you catch my drift, wink, wink, nudge, nudge). Part of the fun is that the other man is called "Bone!" You might as well call him "Boner" so that you can get a good laugh out of bad lines like, "There was no substitute for Bone(r)" and, "I really missed Bone(r)."

Even the fight Jordan and Bone(r) finally have is hilarious: Jordan is bringing Bone(r) fresh coffee (i.e., something a traditional wife might do for a husband) when the fight starts. But there aren't any manly punches, no, no, no. Instead Bone(r) grabs Jordan by the lapels and pins him up against a wall, presumably ripping Jordan's bodice in the process.

Unfortunately, these funny moments don't make it worth reading the entire book.
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