George V. Higgins entered the mystery scene in 1973 with The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, his best novel and the one that set a pattern for most of the books to follow. Higgins tells his stories mostly through dialogue, letting his characters speak for themselves, and they usually turn out to be both talkative and interesting. Higgins himself worked as a lawyer on both sides of the aisle and was for a time an assistant Attorney General in Massachusetts.