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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9781852429270
ISBN number: 1852429275
Label: Serpent's Tail
Manufacturer: Serpent's Tail
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: May 01, 2007
Publishing house: Serpent's Tail
Sale Popularity Level: 509489
Studio: Serpent's Tail
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
'I loved this book. It's a private ticket into a secret world of desire and sex and the raw edge between them . . . I read it with the fever of the addicted.'-Michael Connelly
'I never miss a book by Vicki Hendricks. No one on the current scene is writing super-charged, erotic, real noir novels like these.'-George P. Pelecanos
Renata is young, beautiful, and has sex for money and kicks. Few are immune to her intoxicating allure-even her pet Burmese python, Pepe, seems captive to her charm. Richard is one of her clients, a poetry professor with a wife and two sons, whose erotic fascination with Rennie is threatening his home and job.
Meanwhile, Julie, a shy wannabe novelist, spies on Rennie from her room subsequent door in between bouts of frustrated writing. Both would do anything to save Rennie from her dangerous occupation and become her one true love.
Set in Miami's gaudy vacationland and the haunting atmosphere of the Everglades, Cruel Poetry is a gripping story of fatal attraction that captures the Florida behind the postcards. As the lives of Richard and Julie unravel amidst drugs and murder, Hendricks amps the adrenaline jolts and sweeps us to a bittersweet climax.
Vicki Hendricks lives in Hollywood, Florida, where she teaches English and creative writing. A fan of dangerous sports, she has completed 550 skydives, learned to dog sled in Finland, and has been birding in the jungles of Costa Rica.
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Rated by buyers 
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I gave it a try. Why? Georges P. Pelecanos said some good things about it. I love Pelecanos a great fan. His humanity, his trueness, his realness whether you're in the 70's or yesterday. I love the way he uses the music and sound. But like I said before I admire most of all his love for the people: Police, gangster,ex-con, detective, drug fiends and dealers, but also the mother, the sister, the brother, the friend, the girlfriend, the wife, the daughter and the son... I love it because it's real.
There's nothing real about Vicky Hendrix it's all about her and her own fantasy as a person and a writer. But really more about her. The writer, if there is one, is the excuse to be her self. There is no love for the people because the people does not exist except in her soaped up mind. It's tasteless, it's spiceless.
But it is obscenely pretentious. I think I'm a little mad at Georges P right now:)!
Rated by buyers 
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...will be pretty much a function of how much you believe porn can replace an original plot in a noir novel. I gave up after a hundred pages or so (rare for me) because I want vividly drawn characters, not caricatures.
What I learned from this book is that there are a lot of 'live for the moment, beautiful people' in South Beach. Some of them are really exceptionally attractive, and they can get their way regardless of any other personal characteristics or deficiencies. And desire can drive otherwise sensible people to do dumb things with severe consequences.
In other words, there is nothing here that has not been done in scores of previous noir novels.
So, given that the cover is pretty reflective of what the book is, why did I pick it up? Because Michael Connelly, who has written only one weak book (Chasing the Dime) and a whole slew of fantastic ones praised Cruel Poetry to the hilt.
Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but I think he really missed it on this one.
Rated by buyers 
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In Miami Beach if you are male and can crawl let alone walk, you are attracted to the happy hooker Renata. Men cannot help themselves when it comes to this charming siren who has mesmerized even Pepe her snake and her pimp Francisco knows he should keep his hands off the merchandise, but cannot. Even women are intoxicated by this femme fatale. Client Professor Dick is beyond infatuation for her as he has a permanent wet spot whenever he comes to see Renata; make that even when he thinks of his Renata, which means he is diligently wet 24/7. Next door is Jules the writer who hears her sexcapades through the thin walls when she entertains clients, but is frustrated so he settles for fantasy time with her.
Rennie is not a nasty person though she can be tough. When Francisco wants more of her time with him, she calmly tells him they need her income to have any time together. When Richard vows to obtain a divorce and quit his job to be with her, she diligently tries to convince him his family needs him for then her. When Jules desires much more from her; she tries to persuade her they both need their friendship more than becoming lovers. However some men cannot be reasoned with using logic as they make decisions with their lower head in charge. Thus trying to make their fantasy come true, Richard and Jules will do anything including murdering her clients, family members, and perhaps the partner to get Rennie out of her occupation and permanently into their respective lives.
Though this character driven thriller rotates perspectives between Rennie, Dick, and Jules, the story line centers on the prostitute as much as of what the others do and think about her. The story line is fast-paced as sexual fantasy becomes homicide nightmares. Fans of Florida Noir will enjoy this sex and murder thriller in which blood flows more freely than scum.
Harriet Klausner
Rated by buyers -
Cruel Poetry is Vicki Hendricks' best, most compelling novel yet. And that's a lot to say considering the accolades she received for her earlier work. The writing is fantastic. The characters are wickedly drawn, and the action is plenty exciting. There's an innocence to the violence that these characters indulge in, but the psychological violence is more devastating than the physical. I think the ending was perfect for this story.
Rated by buyers -
In this, her latest novel, Hendricks, the undisputed queen of South Florida noir, plunges deeper into the pathological motivations of people who by some deep human flaw have shed most of their morals for survival.
Cruel Poetry drops some of the usual almost cartoonish noir devices Henricks fans have come to expect. Instead the reader is offered a more literary treat that puts her latest book on a par with more literary classics like "The Story of O" or the Marquis de Sade's writings.
For my taste, the very first few sex scenes seemed a bit too obviously designed to pull in readers looking just for the steamy stuff, but it didn't take long for the plot to grab hold of me. Like Pepe, the slithering pet snake writhing along Renata's lovely limbs and trunk, it slowly gripped me. After that I couldn't put the book down.
Henricks manages in this novel to paint a truly vivid portrait of a woman living by impuse alone. Renata is a survivor pure and simple. Jules, the somewhat innocent neighbor who views Renata and her bizarre life of revolving sexual partners coupled with complicated loyalities through a peephole in the wall adjoining their rooms, struggles to retain her purity even as she is hypnotically drawn into Rennie and her boyfriend Francisco's steamy world of sex, alcohol and drug addcition, and murder.
The tension created by this is totally mesmerizing. Jules near fatal attraction to Renata is only matched by Richard, the unhappy English professor and failed poet who is willing to sacrifice anything to fufill his fantasy of redeeming the "whore" in Renata, and thereby perhaps redeeming himself.
One word of warning though. Don't read this book in public. You'd have to be dead not to be aroused by it.
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