Plot or Premise

A robbery crew is planning to rip off an entire small apartment building of tenants in one night.

What I Liked

I had read a lot of Sanders’ novels before I got to this one, out of order. While it is the first of the Edward X. Delaney series, he is a relatively small part of the book near the end. Instead, it reads like the same structure of the movie, the Usual Suspects (which drew inspiration from the book). There are scenes in the present day, after the day of the robbery, with people being interviewed about what happened. But in addition to their witness statements, there are also numerous electronic surveillance tapes of the various criminals being surveilled by a bunch of different police groups, none of which are talking to each other.

What I Didn’t Like

I was on the fence for the rating between four stars or five. While the book is awesome, there is a niggling detail in the plot that bothers me. The “premise” of all the surveillance is that all of these crooks were being surveilled by separate law enforcement units (different precincts, different federal agencies, and so on), and so none of them had the “big picture” to prevent it. Which is fine, it’s a tale as old as time as they say, and a popular theme for crime sprees like serial killers. No one was looking at the cases as connected. Which is fine as a premise, except in each of the fictional tapes referred to as the premise for the book, it is very clear not only that a crime is about to happen, but in many of them, the actual day of the crime, at least one of the major players, and in some cases, the address of the building. Yet NONE of the law enforcement agencies portrayed as running the wiretaps bother to warn the precinct where it will happen, or when, or how? It’s not very realistic in plotting, as the tapes are made several months in advance, according to the text. If it was all in the week ahead, potentially the transcripts weren’t ready or nobody had listened to the tapes yet, sure. But months ahead, someone would have warned someone so the cops could be ready. In the end, I decided it wasn’t a big enough plot device to knock it down a full star.

The Bottom Line

The first book of a master storyteller