"Where would a twenty-two-year-old kid rather be? Setting the table for a corned beef and cabbage dinner with her old man, forks scraping, moths fluttering against the window, the briny smell from the kitchen sinking into my skin with each tock of the imitation grandfather clock? Or gliding my way through the fuzzy dark of the Tee Hee, vibrating with low, slow jazz, clusters of juniper-breathed men and women touching, hands on lapels, fingers on silk nylons, cigarettes releasing willowy clouds into every acid green banquette?"

Whereas Die a Little was a bit like a domestic noir à la Mildred Pierce (1941), Queenpin is glamorous 70s Cher dressed in a skin-tight dress and packs a sharp punch. That's great too, just in a different way. High heels for sauntering around casinos, low-heeled shoes for burying bodies.

There's roughness in the bedroom and outside the bedroom, and when the unnamed narrator slowly descends into the sewers fully aware of what is going to happen, she does it wrapped around a man (a classic male narrator would get into trouble because of a femme fatale). The sex is implied but one scene in particular is brutally violent, and Abbott's writing and use of slang just makes the story extra convincing. As always, there's no redemption because the dark side is too alluring.