Queenpin

Abbott’s Edgar Award-winning third novel and the book that best represents her roots in classic noir. A young woman is taken under the wing of Gloria Denton, a mob legend from the golden age of organized crime, who teaches her the business of casinos, racetracks, and heists. The apprenticeship is intoxicating until it becomes a trap.

Why Start Here

“Queenpin” is Abbott at her most concentrated. The novel reads like a lost Jim Thompson or James M. Cain book, but with a crucial difference: both protagonist and antagonist are women, and the power dynamics between them are more complex and charged than anything in the traditional canon. Abbott does not just add women to noir. She reimagines what noir looks like when female ambition and ruthlessness are at the center.

The prose is sleek and period-perfect. The narrator’s voice has the clipped cool of a classic hard-boiled protagonist, but her motivations are her own: hunger for glamour, a need to belong, a willingness to cross lines that becomes clearer and more dangerous as the stakes rise. When the inevitable betrayal comes, it lands with the force of the best genre fiction.

What to Expect

A short, propulsive crime novel with a vintage feel and a modern sensibility. The pacing is relentless. The atmosphere is smoky casinos and late-night racetracks. At 192 pages, it is a quick read that punches well above its weight. A perfect gateway to Abbott’s later, more psychologically complex novels.