Review of Linwood Barclay's A Tap on the Window

A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay

Hear the words "Niagara Falls," and what comes to mind? A dizzying drop of thundering water and clouds of mist, sure. There's the famous vaudeville routine, during which the innocent mention of Niagara Falls triggers a maniac's memory of revenge and an attack that begins with his bellow, "Slowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch" (see Abbott and Costello's version here, and the Three Stooges, here). The 1953 movie Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten, inspired mobs of honeymooners to visit the Falls. Daredevils have gone over the Falls in barrels and teetered across high wires spanning the Niagara River gorge, although people swept over the Falls by accident or design face high odds against survival.

That's why a person "Mister" is threatening to throw into the Niagara River is panic-stricken in the conversation that opens Linwood Barclay's thriller, A Tap on the Window (New American Library/Penguin Group (USA), 2013). We don't know that person's fate before the scene shifts suddenly to the car containing our narrator, Cal Weaver, a middle-aged former cop who's now a private eye in Griffon, New York, a town of 8,000 about an hour from Buffalo. Of all people, Cal knows that picking up a teenage girl hitchhiking in the rain outside Patchett's Bar is a monumentally dumb thing to do. But he does it anyway, because when he opens the car window in response to her tap on the glass, she tells him she knew his son, Scott. Scott died when he fell off the roof of Ravelson Furniture two months earlier, and it has devastated Cal and his wife, Donna. Cal, determined to hear what Claire Sanders, the mayor's daughter, can tell him about Scott, lets her into his car.

Claire and Cal may as well have joined hands and jumped into the nearby Niagara River; this book's characters have about as much control over their fates as swimmers engulfed in the rapids near the Falls. Writer Barclay, a Canadian, often sets his thrillers on the American side of the border, and he isn't one to politely ignore American anxieties. Instead, he hoses his complex characters with them and turns their resulting behavior into a corkscrewing tale of suspense. We can even pity the victimizers, because they're also victims here. One story line—written in italics in short, separate chapters—involves what looks like an off-kilter private matter, before we understand how it meshes with the other story line Cal narrates about himself and small-town politics and life in Griffon.

The problems facing Griffon are familiar ones to Americans. While some Griffon citizens, including the mayor, believe the police go too far in their attempts to prevent crime (like spray painting a young graffiti artist's throat and knocking out a suspicious stranger's teeth), others believe a low crime rate justifies the means. Griffon deals with underage drinking by semi-tolerating it at Patchett's, because at least the bar's owner, Phyllis, is keeping a practiced eye on the teenagers there. Some parents can't be bothered to ride herd on their teenagers. They're too busy stealing from their employers, treating their employees shamefully, cheating on their spouses, worrying about what the neighbors will think, or simply watching TV. But well-meaning, concerned parents like the Weavers aren't perfect people either, and they aren't immune to problems and heartbreak. Griffon kids contribute their share to the wreckage of family happiness by abusing drugs and breaking the law, lying and keeping secrets, using their cellphones to send pictures of their privates, spending the night with a lover—you know, being screwed-up kids. In fact, messed-up relationships between parents and their kids are at the center of this thriller. Even the normal problems of communication between adults and teenagers spur the plot along.

This reminds me: we left Claire and Cal in the car. Cal gets nowhere in his conversation with Claire before she complains of an upset stomach and asks him to stop at Iggy's so she can use the restroom. When she doesn't return, Cal goes in to check on her, without success. He returns to the car and sees a young woman inside it. She resembles Claire, has the same hair, and is wearing the same clothes, but they haven't traveled far before Cal realizes she isn't Claire. He also realizes they are being followed. When he tells her he knows something screwy is going on, the not-Claire insists on getting out and disappears into the night. Unfortunately for Cal, he is now involved in the disappearances of two teenage girls, and neither his conscience nor the police (Cal has an adversarial relationship with his brother-in-law, the chief of police) will let him shrug it off. Before Cal is finished narrating this excellent thriller, we'll see lives play out and end—step by surprising step, inch by confounding inch—a stone's throw away from Niagara Falls.

Review of Owen Laukkanen's Criminal Enterprise

Criminal Enterprise by Owen Laukkanen

Maybe you're familiar with "Minnesota nice," the stereotypical well-mannered behavior of people born and raised in the state of Minnesota. It means you're self-deprecating. You do polite things like taking at least an hour to say goodbye and refusing offered food three times before accepting it even if you're half-dead starved. You avoid fuss and confrontation.

Owen Laukkanen

Canadians have their own stereotypical behavior, which combines well with that of Minnesotans. I can picture the talented Canadian writer Owen Laukkanen climbing off his moose after a snowy morning ride and eating pancakes hosed with maple syrup before sitting down and wrestling with his own Canadian niceness in order to write about crime. Then Laukkanen can wrench his middle-aged Minnesota BCA Agent Kirk Stevens away from his home––where he makes nice with his legal-aid lawyer wife Nancy and their kids––to team him up with beautiful young FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere, a high-octane workaholic who fishtailed her car into Minneapolis-Saint Paul from Miami.

In Laukkanen's terrific 2012 debut, The Professionals (see review here), Stevens and Windermere collaborate on a well-publicized case––the Pender gang's multi-state kidnapping spree. Criminal Enterprise begins a year later. Stevens has promised Nancy he'll do no more cowboying and is working cold BCA cases. He's trying to convince himself that the sense of accomplishment from solving one matches the thrill of working with Windermere, but he's not succeeding. While Stevens pursues an old case involving a murdered man and his missing wife, Windermere is longing for the competent, easy-going Stevens. Her current FBI partner, Bob Doughty, pulls rank and tosses a wet blanket over her attempts to solve the armed bank robbery on "Eat Street" in Minneapolis.

The bank was robbed by a ski-masked couple: a woman carrying a sawed-off shotgun and a blue-eyed man who brandished an assault rifle. The man cruelly pretended to shoot a teller before he and his partner leaped into a waiting Toyota Camry and were driven away. Your typical bank robbers tend to be amateurs or impulsive degenerates; the Eat Street robbers' weapons and behavior lead Windermere to believe they could be pros.  She begins to examine previous open-case robberies to see if she can detect a pattern and identify a suspect.

On the surface, Carter Tomlin looks like a bad bet for bank robbery. Tomlin is an accountant who lives with his wife Becca and kids in a big Victorian on Summit Avenue, the luxurious Saint Paul neighborhood in which Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived. Tomlin over-leveraged himself to buy into the American dream, and when he is laid off from the job he's held for 20 years, it's a catastrophe. Tomlin has always believed a man provides for his family. In times of adversity, real men don't complain, they deal with it.

Tomlin deals with it by free-lance accounting and burning through savings. Desperate, he walks into the bank to talk to a loan officer, but then Tomlin has an epiphany. He walks out, buys a cheap disguise at the Walmart next door, and robs the bank instead. The take isn't much so Tomlin obtains some weapons, picks up a couple of partners, and tackles bigger targets. And, guess what? He doesn't feel emasculated any more. In fact, Tomlin feels like a god when he's holding a gun, and he begins to live for the adrenaline rush of committing crime. What do they say about addicts? They require increasingly higher-dose fixes.

Before you dismiss Tomlin as a completely unbelievable character, think about what criminologist Richard Wright, who wrote Armed Robbers in Action, says about self-reinforcing behavior: "Once somebody takes an action, in this case a shootout, then you're off and running. After that events take on a logic of their own, especially when you have these self-enclosed systems of self-reinforcing behavior. None of them make sense except in relation to one another."

This high-voltage thriller practically deserves a warning label on its cover. What with watching Tomlin befriending Stevens, Windermere trying to get the goods on Tomlin, a guy with a personal beef tracking Tomlin, Tomlin turning into a bad-ass criminal who makes ever-crazier decisions; and wondering whether Tomlin's partners in crime, Tricia Henderson and Dragan Medic, can be trusted––I'm not kidding, at one point I found my butt hovering a few inches above the chair, I was that amped up. Take your heart or high-blood pressure medication before you read Criminal Enterprise.

Oh, but before you do, don't neglect to read The Professionals first. It's not necessary to understand Criminal Enterprise, but do it because these books are so much fun. They look at issues such as the toll of juggling personal and professional lives, the impact of an economic downturn, the strain of leading a double life, and relationships between men and women and between parents and their children. There's an interesting chemistry between Stevens, a good cop and family man, and Windermere, a glamorous and gutsy FBI special agent. In addition, the writing is so crisp you can almost hear it crunch between your teeth, and the action builds to a jaws-clenching finish. Don't take my word for it. Pretend you're from Minnesota or Canada and be nice to yourself by reading Laukkanen.

Note: I received a free advance review copy of Criminal Enterprise. It will be published on March 21, 2013 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. I'm thrilled to learn that Laukkanen is now at work on his third Stevens/Windermere book.

Spreading Some Holiday Cheer

Take a break from the winter holiday planning. Abandon your shopping, cleaning, New Year's resolutions listing, gift wrapping, cards mailing, decorating, baking, madly running around, or smooching under the mistletoe. Swipe a cookie. Fetch a drink, and settle down with a terrific book, like one of those below:

According to Mike Bowditch of Paul Doiron's The Poacher's Son, his father Jack is a "saloon-brawling logger with a rap sheet of misdemeanors and the public persona of a Tasmanian devil." The 24-year-old Mike hasn't spent much time with Jack since his parents divorced when he was nine, and he moved to southern Maine, from its wild northern woods, with his mom. After glumly watching the pavement spreading beneath his feet and graduating from college, Mike became a Maine game warden, a cop whose beat is the forest. It's an all-consuming, poorly-paying job, but Mike loves it.

Now, Mike's girlfriend Sarah has given up on his ever attending law school and has moved out. He hasn't seen his father for several years. An angry meeting about a Canadian timber company's purchase of Maine forest land and what it means for the land's leaseholders ends with the ambush-style shootings of Jonathan Shipman, the company's spokesman, and Deputy Bill Brodeur, who was driving him. Immediate suspicion falls on Jack. When Jack escapes from police custody and disappears into the woods, Mike and his mother are the only people who think he's innocent. Mike risks his job, his friendships, and his relationship with Sarah to find and clear his father.

While we follow Mike's actions in the present, he reminisces about earlier times with Jack. The shifts in time and setting are very smoothly handled. Doiron's characterization, setting, pacing, and plotting are all first-rate. This book is a realistic portrayal of complicated relationships between a son and his father, men and women, and people and nature, as well as the suspenseful search for a double-murder suspect that reaches an explosive finish. By the end, I was holding onto my chair.

The Poacher's Son, published by Minotaur Books in 2010, was nominated for four major mystery fiction awards and received the 2011 Barry Award for Best First Novel. The author grew up in Maine and is currently the editor-in-chief of Down East and a Registered Maine Guide. During this last week, I've been unhappy about the shooting of wolves right outside Yellowstone National Park. Reading this achingly vivid book, written by a man who obviously loves the woods of Maine, its traditional way of life, and its wildlife––and who also recognizes the terrible toll of progress––somehow soothed my spirit. Shelve Doiron's Mike Bowditch books next to books by C. J. Box. I highly recommend this one, the first in the series.

A father-son relationship isn't the main focus of Canadian writer Linwood Barclay's 2012 stand-alone book, Trust Your Eyes, published by Penguin Group (USA). Instead, the center of interest is the relationship between two adult brothers: Ray is a 37-year-old illustrator who lives in Burlington, Vermont. He looks like the slender Vince Vaughn from the movie Swingers. His two-years-younger brother, Thomas, lives in Promise Falls, New York, and looks like the meatier Vince Vaughn from The Break-Up.

Thomas is a schizophrenic and maps savant. He has decorated the upstairs hallway of the family home, where he lives with his widowed father, with so many map pieces it looks "as if someone had put the world into a blender and turned it into wallpaper." Thomas spends 23 hours per day in his bedroom, and he uses almost every waking moment to memorize the world's cities, using the computer program Whirl360. According to Thomas, this is a job he does for the CIA. Thomas foresees a catastrophic global event that will cripple computers and thus create a world without maps. He'll be the only person who knows how to reproduce them. "And not just maps, but how each and every street in the world looks. Every storefront, every front yard, every intersection." Keeping track of Thomas's progress on this project and acting as his CIA liaison is former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who "talks" in Thomas's head.

Whirl360's street-view maps are made
by a car similar to this one

When Ray and Thomas's father dies in a lawn-tractor accident, Ray returns to Promise Falls to take care of his father's estate and to figure out Thomas's future. It helps Ray when he runs into Julie McGill, an old high-school acquaintance who now works as a reporter for the Promise Falls Standard. It becomes more difficult for him when Thomas's emails to the CIA cause the FBI to visit. Things get more complicated still when Thomas insists that Ray investigate something Thomas saw while "walking" through Whirl360's streets of Manhattan: an apartment window revealing what looks like a woman's head covered in plastic. Thomas believes he's witnessed a murder.

Trust Your Eyes alternates chapters, in which Ray narrates his travails with Thomas, with chapters detailing a political campaign that's running amok. These two story lines, which travel back and forth in time, require the reader's attention, but eventually they connect in a very satisfying way. The whole 498-page book is satisfying; a Russian nesting doll of layer-upon-layer deception and betrayal. There's a delicious contrast between obvious blunders that just get worse and seemingly inconsequential actions that lead, step by step, to disastrous consequences. It's great to see characters with mental illnesses featured as interesting good guys, rather than villains, in books such as Franck Thilliez's thriller, Syndrome E (reviewed here); Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (reviewed here); George Dawes Green's The Caveman's Valentine (reviewed here), and this one.

Doiron's The Poacher's Son and Barclay's Trust Your Eyes are written by talented story tellers. They feature characters who grow and change. They provide a fascinating look at relationships, the nature of love, and the expectations people have for each other. These books are a good springboard for discussions about how we make decisions and the role that chance plays in our fate. On top of this, they're fine mystery fiction. They're sure-fire holiday cheer.

Crime Fiction on the Couch

You're lying on a psychiatrist's couch, and there's plenty to talk about. Unshakable bad habits, haunting dreams, wacky family and friends.

You meet a psychiatrist at a party. You can't stand there stripping your psyche naked. What can you talk about? The DSM-V. That's the latest, due out in May 2013, in a series called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. Believe me, after your new friend stops sputtering, you'll have yourself a conversation.

Since 1840, when the U.S. Census asked about "idiocy/insanity," Americans have struggled to identify and categorize what isn't "normal." The DSM and its equivalent, the ICD (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), attempt to standardize the classification of mental disorders for clinical, research, and educational purposes by using specific diagnostic criteria. The DSM-V committees are still laboring under a deluge of help and a hailstorm of criticism––including fierce friendly fire––tinkering with current diagnostic categories, debating issues such as extended grief, working on new diagnoses (including one called "sluggish cognitive tempo"), and vetoing others because they sweep in too many of us or exclude too many of us already diagnosed. They have a Herculean task.

I'll be curious to see the DSM-V. In the meantime, I enjoy browsing through my husband's DSM-IV-TR and meeting complex fictional characters who'd be candidates for various mental health diagnoses. Here are a few books I've enjoyed:

Camilla Läckberg must have had the ICD handy when she wrote The Stonecutter, the third book in her series with cop Patrik Hedström and writer Erica Falck and set in Fjällbacka, Sweden. I've rarely met so many troubled fictional characters outside of a psychiatric setting, such as the one in Oregon described in Ken Kesey's terrific One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. A few possible diagnoses for some of Läckberg's characters include Asperger's disorder, pedophilia, narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

The victim is a young girl who has been diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) and DAMP (deficits in attention, motor control and perception––a classification used only in Sweden). A fisherman finds her drowned, tangled in the line of his lobster pot. Patrik goes to the scene. The death of a child is always terrible, but this one is particularly bad for Patrik, father of a new baby daughter with Erica, because he recognizes her as Sara, the daughter of one of Erica's friends. The postmortem discovers bath water, rather than seawater, in Sara's lungs, so a murder investigation begins.

Photo of Fjällbacka by Frank Heuer

This thriller is one of those books that jump to a different location and set of characters every few pages. There are two story lines, one of which begins in 1923, that connect near the end. Although I had no difficulty following Läckberg's plot or keeping her characters straight, after 489 pages of constantly leapfrogging about, I felt as if I had artifically-induced ADHD. I wasn't thrilled by how the crime is finally solved, but watching how several monstrous characters are created and how dysfunctional families struggle to cope make this a very interesting read.

One of my favorite fictional psychopaths is Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, who meets DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder. Ripley is a complex person who takes advantage of others' naïvité and moves from one illegal activity to another. His conscience isn't completely missing; Ripley is capable of some empathy and feeling a degree of remorse, but these traits aren't strong enough to prevent him from defrauding or murdering people. Ripley isn't sadistic; he doesn't take pleasure in killing for killing's sake. The murderous methods Ripley chooses are fairly civilized: a clunk on the head with a bottle, a quick garroting or a gunshot. Despite his crimes, Ripley is strangely likable, and a reader roots for him to succeed.

Highsmith's series involves books of psychological observation that study the subject of guilt. Because Ripley's life changes over the course of the series, the books are best read in order. Begin with The Talented Mr. Ripley, written in 1955. Ripley goes to Italy at the request of Dickie Greenleaf's rich father to find Dickie and talk him into returning home. One thing happens after another, and before long Dickie is dead, and Tom's life is forever changed. This book was made into a 1999 movie starring Matt Damon as Ripley and Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf. It's an okay movie, but not as good as Highsmith's book.

In the next book, Ripley under Ground, Ripley is living with his charming heiress wife Héloïse in Belle Ombre, a chateau near the French village of Villeperce. He has organized a lucrative scheme with some London friends that involves forging Derwatt paintings. All is going well until Thomas Murchison, an American Derwatt collector, decides one of his paintings is a forgery. Ripley pulls out the stops to convince him otherwise.

There are three more Ripley books, and they see him becoming more comfortable with his wife and more concerned about his reputation. Ripley's life is going well in Ripley's Game until one of his criminal acquaintances, Reeves Minot, asks him to commit a murder for him. Ripley refuses, but he suggests that Minot hire a poor picture framer for the job. This idea doesn't pan out well. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley, a 16-year-old American boy who has just killed his wealthy father looks up Ripley in France. American David Pritchard arrives in Ripley under Water. Pritchard is obsessed with the rumors swirling around Ripley's past, and he digs into the disappearance of Thomas Murchison from Ripley under Ground. These five books form a portrait of a man who doesn't feel the guilt from his actions that he should.

With Forty Words for Sorrow, Giles Blunt introduces his John Cardinal police procedural series, set in the fictional town of Algonquin Bay in northern Ontario, Canada. Cardinal's wife Catherine has bipolar disorder, and, over the series, Blunt does a great job of describing the effect of this illness on Catherine and her family. In this book, he also presents an unsettling picture of a pair of psychopaths who have none of Ripley's charm.

Like Forty Words for Sorrow, the second book, The Delicate Storm, was inspired by a real-life crime. Some of us might remember the crimes perpetrated by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) in October 1970, while Pierre Trudeau was prime minister of Canada.

The ever-escalating tension and dread of the first book is absent in The Delicate Storm. It is beautifully crafted with vivid characterizations and stunningly described settings you'll never forget. As usual with this series, the cruel winter far north in Ontario is one of the main characters. As the book opens, it is three weeks into January, and the temperature is doing what it never does in January in Algonquin Bay––rising above freezing. The streets are shiny with melted snow, thick fog is sidling up against the buildings in town, and the bears are coming out of hibernation early. They're hungry, and this isn't happy news for Ivan Bergeron, who has a raging hangover. It does his head no good when he hears his dog barking frantically in the woods. By the time Bergeron makes it outside, Shep is back in the yard, whining and clawing at something he has retrieved for his master. The something "lay there, fishbelly white, hair curling along one side. Toward the wrist end, the flesh still bore the zigzag impression of a watch with an expandable bracelet. Even though there was no hand attached, there was no doubt that the thing lying in Ivan Bergeron's backyard was a human arm." While Bergeron is making his grisly discovery, homicide detectives John Cardinal and his French-Canadian colleague, Lise Delorme, are tracking down one of the area's most incompetent criminals, who has just ineptly robbed a bank. These two disparate events lead Cardinal and Delorme into an investigation of crimes that took place 30 years earlier, involving the Mounties and the FLQ.

This book should be read after Forty Words for Sorrow because what happened in that book is discussed, characters grow and change, and relationships between characters are explored in more depth. Cardinal's relationships with his father, his wife, and Delorme are very well done––this decent man could be someone we know and like. He's far from perfect, but he's not the same troubled/alcoholic cop one often finds in police procedurals these days. The inter-agency squabbles go on a bit long, and at some point I could see where things were heading, but I still enjoyed the getting there. This book does a terrific job of evoking the cultural and political atmosphere of the late 1960s/early 1970s––what the radicals were doing and the government was doing in response.

When Black Fly Season begins, it's that horrible time of the year when black flies are biting anything that moves. As Blunt says, "The black fly may be less than a quarter inch long, but up close it resembles an attack helicopter, fitted with a sucker at one end and a nasty little hook on the other. Even one of these creatures can be a misery. Caught in a swarm, a person can very rapidly go mad."

A red-haired woman draws attention from the regulars who have taken refuge from the flies to drink in an Algonquin Bay bar. She is beautiful, but covered with black fly bites; she also presents an oddly flat affect and says she doesn't know anything about herself or her present condition. Fortunately, a cop takes her to a hospital emergency room where doctors discover that she has a bullet in her brain.

Cardinal and Delorme begin an inquiry into her shooting that leads them to a mutilated corpse and into a drug dealers' turf war between the Viking Riders motorcycle gang and some small-time criminals led by a charismatic leader named Red Bear. Blunt's readers zig zag between the drug dealers' shenanigans, Cardinal and Delorme's investigation, and "Red" as she regains her memory. While the story unfolds, the cops (and the reader) become more and more anxious to see the perpetrators brought to justice.

The subtitle to Black Fly Season could be "Life as Hell." Many of Blunt's characters lead lives that can turn nightmarish on a dime: Cardinal must deal not only with his anxiety-provoking investigation, but with his estranged daughter and wife Catherine, who has been in and out of mental hospitals due to her bipolar disorder. It has been two years since her last hospitalization for depression, and she is now preparing to leave on a professional trip to Toronto. Catherine resents Cardinal's worries about her emotional state; when she's joyous or full of energy, he sees mania looming. It's a miracle neither of them has an ulcer. One of Red Bear's men, Kevin, is a failure as a poet but a resounding success as a heroin addict. Red Bear and his partner Leon scare Kevin with their propensity for violence and obsession with bizarre rituals, but he pushes these thoughts aside in favor of more comfortable fantasies about kicking his addiction and being interviewed about his poetry by David Letterman or Martin Amis.

Black Fly Season contains fascinating information (at least to me!) about various fly species and beetles that feast on corpses in various states of decay and how this information is analyzed for forensic evidence. The reasons for the ritualistic murders are interesting, but they are also disturbing. This book contains some very unsettling images of animal and human torture and gore. This is the third Cardinal/Delorme book that I've read, but Delorme is still not well fleshed out. In contrast, Blunt's characterization of the bad guys in this book is dazzling. He is insightful about bipolar disorder and addiction. The setting buzzes, whirs, and hums with insects. Life during black fly season in Algonquin Bay, Ontario, is full of pain for everybody.

By the Time You Read This describes the death of Catherine Cardinal. The book deals with depression, suicide, child sexual abuse, bipolar disorder, and pornography. Blunt handles these difficult subjects with skill, and he is very insightful when his characters deal with grief and feelings of guilt. As usual, his characterization is mostly excellent. In a few lines, Blunt can describe a very minor character so well you'll never forget him. I hope we learn more about Delorme in the next book, Crime Machine, which I haven't yet read.

For further reading, I suggest the DSM. Reading any of the above books in bed may not aid your sleep, and I offer no guarantee that you'll stay off a psychiatrist's couch. You will, however, meet some characters who should spend some time there.

Going Pro: Owen Laukkanen's The Professionals

The Northern Lights

My love of Canada dates back to one winter night when I was a kid growing up in Washington state, and my dad pointed out the northern lights. A country north of us, closer to that beautiful sky, had to be pretty darn wonderful, I thought.

Canada is home to some great crime fiction writers: Louise Penny, Giles Blunt, Peter Robinson, Alan Bradley, William Deverell, Robert Rotenberg, Gail Bowen, Howard Engel, Inger Ash Wolfe (pseudonym of Michael Redhill), Eric Wright, Jon Redfern, Linwood Barclay. Yesterday I was pleased to meet another Canadian, Owen Laukkanen, who was neighborly enough to introduce me to four fresh University of Washington graduates in his 2012 thriller, The Professionals, published by Putnam.

If Marie, Pender, Mouse and Sawyer had graduated with a UW degree in engineering or a science, their lives would have taken a different tack. But maybe not. Mouse scored an internship at Microsoft, but he is a hacker at heart and too much of an anarchist to settle down in an office. The four friends all needed money, but they couldn't see themselves waiting tables or selling insurance. What started off as a joke about robbing banks became a conversation about the Pender method of crime. Forget the Hail Mary approach, he argued. Big crimes attract big crowds. Police, feds, and TV cameras. Ultimately, jail or death for the criminals. It was better to go for lower numbers, but higher volume. How about kidnapping mid-level executives with enough cash and the families to pay a "reasonable" ransom? It's an inconvenience at those stakes, not a crime, he said. Those victims would just want to see things return to normal. Pender's five-year plan involves staying professional and avoiding greed. Moving their kidnappings around. In five years, if they stick to "low-risk, no-violence" kidnappings, they can retire to the Maldives for a life of sipping drinks on the sand.

The five-year plan has three years to go when The Professionals begins. These kids have their kidnapping routine down cold. The $60,000 ransom still presents sticker shock to their victims; they cannot believe it is so low. All is going well until one victim, back home in Minnesota, decides to call the cops, and veteran Kirk Stevens of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is assigned to the case. When his investigation crosses state lines, Stevens calls the FBI and becomes temporarily attached to the Bureau. The kidnappers aren't aware that Stevens and FBI Agent Carla Windermere are fishing for them. Pender and his friends have a more immediate problem: they've kidnapped the wrong guy. As he's told them, they've just made the biggest motherfucking mistake of their lives. There are bigger pros than the kidnappers in the criminal pond. The Mob is now after them, too.

It's difficult to believe that this book is Laukkanen's debut. His voice is very assured, and his pacing is immaculate. From the moment the book begins––a Chicago victim-to-be checks his watch on the train and dreams of hot lasagna and cold beer, the Bulls game, and a little fun in the master bedroom later––until the end, it's a corkscrewing ride of look ma, no-hands thrills. This book is chock full of surprises. A very clever plot. Great plot twists. Sensational characters.

Owen Laukkanen (photo by Colin O'Connor)

Stevens and Windermere are appealing protagonists. He is happily married to an attorney and has a couple of kids; she has a boyfriend unhappily living in Minnesota who may not last far into this proposed series. That would make plenty of Minnesotans happy because Windermere is exceedingly attractive as well as a terrific investigator. She and Stevens have such a good time on the trail chasing these kidnappers and such an easy chemistry that despite Stevens' fear of flying and homesickness for his family, he wishes the case would never end. I felt the same way. I wanted Pender and his friends to succeed, but I didn't want Stevens and Windermere to fail. How did Laukkanen pull this off? I cannot wait for his next, although The Professionals will be a very tough act to follow.