Jack Clark
Quentin Tarantino picked Nobody’s Angel as his favorite book of 2022: "My favorite fiction novel this year was written by a taxi driver who used to hand it out to his passengers: "It’s a terrific story and character study of a cabbie in Chicago during a time when a serial killer is robbing and murdering cabbies."Meet Chicago Cabbie Eddie Miles 'From the driver’s seat of his cab, Eddie negotiates a city splintered by race and class and rapidly losing its economic underpinnings. Nobody’s Angel has the wry humor and engaging characters typical of the best of the hard-boiled genre, but Clark’s portrait of Chicago in the 1990s, with its vanishing factories and jobs, its lethal public housing projects, its teenage hookers climbing into vans on North Avenue, is what gives it legs. Sure there are a couple murderers on the loose, but the larger violence is coming from systemic forces wreaking havoc in a place that, maybe, used to be better.' --Deanna Isaacs, Chicago Reader'Nobody’s Angel is a gem… which doesn’t contain a wasted word or a false note… Its real beauty lies in Eddie’s bittersweet existence and the special romance and danger of the cabdriver’s life -- lives we often glimpse but rarely give a second thought.' --Patrick Anderson, Washington Post'A fine atmospheric thriller…The cynical, melancholy cabbie point of view is perfect for this kind of neon-lit, noir-tinged, saxophone-scored prose poem, and Clark hits all the right notes.' --Bill Ott, Booklist'Nobody’s Angel is a powerhouse of a book, a genuine work of noir and one of the best books of the year… Clark does something truly remarkable in a mystery novel here. Much like in the great HBO series The Wire, Clark chronicles the collapse of America’s industrial base and its impact upon both our cities and the intractable problem of race in America through the story of an ordinary man… This is an incredible book that you will not soon forget' --Tom Callahan, Bookreporter
