One big branch of U.S. writing is tracing-paper realism. Like sidewalk portrait artists, its practitioners offer a quick, literal sketch drawn from life, but only superficially true to it. Two samples:
Easy Payments, by Ray Doyle (Hermitage; $3), is a soap operetta, and its refrain is that a loan collector's lot is not an easy one. With a baby on the way and a stack of unpaid bills, sobersided Dan Cantrell cannot be choosy about his work. His job as "investigator" for the Trustee Personal Finance Co. is to hound the "slows." He soon finds that...
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