Queenpin is a 2008 Edgar Award nominee for Best Paperback Orginal.I've now read two in this category - the first being Who is Conrad Hirst? - and I am glad that I don't have to decide on best in category. Both both are excellent and very different.

This is a first person narrative by an unnamed, twenty-two years-old woman in an unnamed city (there is a river, it has gambling including horse racing) set sometime in the 50s. The year isn't specified but the 50s fits. The young woman is keeping the books at a rinky-dink nightclub. She is ambitions, "wants more", and is recruited by Gloria Denton, a woman in her forties, with connections to organized crime. Gloria takes the young woman away from the nightclub and puts her into the good life. Gloria see a protegee in the young woman. She begins training the young woman as a courrier, picking up payments, placing bets at the racetrack to manipulate the odds.The young woman falls for the wrong guy, an unlucky gambler named Vic, and her life begins to uravel.

This is the first book by Megan Abbot that I've read and I'm hooked. Ken Bruen has a blurb on the back where he calls her the "new Queen of Noir" and from what I read here it fits. After a couple of chapters I realized who her writing style reminded of - Jim Thompson. Abbot's Gloria Denton and Thompson's Lilly Dillon in The Grifters could have been cut from the same cloth. Being that I am a great Jim Thompson fan, this was a welcome revelation. Abbot carries off the hardboiled, noir style of writing very well. The characters of the young woman, Gloria, and the neer-do-well gambler Vic are well done and fully realized. The story is well paced and moves along smoothly.

I highly recommend this book if you enjoy the had-biting noir style of story and particularly if you have read and enjoyed anything by Jim Thompson.