It takes some time to get to Sharky. The action starts in Italy during World War 2, and an operation gone wrong that leaves four million dollars' worth of gold at the bottom of a lake.

Then we're in Hong Kong in the 1950s for an assassination scene in a brothel that Trevanian probably wished he could have used in Shibumi.

Finally we're in Atlanta in the 1970s for another murder, after which we meet undercover narcotics officer Sharky, who's in the middle of a big bust when some other police officer blunders onto the scene and ruins everything.

Next thing you know there's a psycho drug dealer on a city bus at rush hour about to kill a bunch of kids and old people so Sharky blows him away, saving everyone's lives, but then in the newspapers the next day the story is that Sharky is somehow the jerk so his mean boss kicks him down to the vice squad. And I'm pretty sure this involves a continuity error but I'm not going to worry about it.

So down in vice they think they've got a handle on a prostitution blackmail ring, featuring a practically superhumanly adroit and alluring woman named Domino, another one that probably made Trevanian jealous.

She's involved with a presidential candidate and a mysterious rich guy who has a James Bond villain-worthy scheme to open this gigantic amusement park called Pachinko! which replicates a huge chunk of Hong Kong right here in Atlanta and has as its centerpiece a massive pachinko/pinball machine in which people get into the actual balls and zip through the game, being bounced off the bumpers.

He has evil henchmen galore and most of them have impressive scars.

So Sharky runs into Domino and there's a spark between them and then they run into each other again at the grocery store and there's more of a spark and so she invites him over for soup and they're basically in love.

But then Sharky has to go up to the roof where he can listen to the hidden bugs in her apartment and he hears her having really intense sex with the mysterious rich guy and Sharky is so into her that up there on the roof all by himself he gets turned on and orgasms when she does.

Diehl is not wasting our time here.

This is a thriller and a police procedural that veers back and forth between plausible and ludicrous but offers non-stop action, distinct if not believable characters and no-nonsense sex and violence. It has a George Eliot epigraph.

Sharky himself has a harrowing scene after getting captured by the bad guys at one point and, well, he will never be the same after. This is a book where bad things can happen to good people and not be fixed.

Nobody writes books like this anymore, right? This is of its time. The last gasp of the thriller before horror novels became the thrill, I guess.

I liked it. I'm going to watch the movie and I wouldn't mind reading something else by Diehl.

The first line is "It had been dark less than an hour when Younger and the two sergeants finished loading their equipment on the three mules and prepared to head north toward Torbole and the rendezvous with La Volte".