Small-time gambler John Stewart loses 13 grand to a Mafia boss in a rigged Las Vegas poker game. He doesn't have the money with him, so he also loses two fingers and is given 24 hours to pay up. He skips town in his '64 Mustang, which breaks down in the dreary town of Sierra. Three hours later, Stewart has insulted his mechanic, narrowly escaped death in a grocery-store holdup, and met the beautiful and mysterious Grace, who is, of course, very dangerous and whose husband hires Stewart to kill her. If this sounds like gripping, fast-paced '90s noir to you, it's probably because you've never heard of Jim Thompson, who covered all this material 40 years before Stray Dogs was written and managed to stretch it out over a dozen-odd books. Thompson's fans can play a fun game by matching this book's themes with Thompson's novels: Small town ready to explode in violence = Pop. 1180; beautiful-but-dangerous seductress = Hell Of A Woman; small-town hood down on his luck = many famous titles to choose from. This is a disappointing first effort from John Ridley, though he does display the occasional well-turned phrase and dose of genuine tension. But his normal field is screenwriting, and he was probably thinking film all along. That kind of toss-it-all-in thinking transforms Stray Dogs from a fever-pitched story of desperation and murder into, well, a rather fevered, high-concept pitch.