Review: Crashed

 Crashed is apparently the first of seven Junior Bender novels, at any rate the first I’ve read. If this is a taste of what the rest of the six are like, he can keep churning them out as far as I’m concerned. Junior is a burglar, and a smart one at that. Which is what gets him in trouble. Can his smarts to get him out? But when you’re burglar, a smart burglar at least, you also have a sense of ethics to deal with too–not a simple true-blue code, but a constantly moving target.

These are the two elements to guide our plot, and the target is indeed constantly moving. Hanging from the chandelier with a slobbering pack of dogs beneath you? It’s just another job, except it’s not just another job, it’s a setup, one which will get our hero blackmailed and dropped into the soup, and then further into the soup, till he eventually finds himself at the bottom of the bowl. Bender finds himself in the distasteful (and precarious) position of being hired out to a (female) crime boss who’s heard about his smarts, and wants him to run herd on a former child star turned junkie she’s picked out to make her porno debut–against unknown forces intent on sabotaging the production. But Bender develops a soft spot for the girl, and when a close friend winds up dead he decides to turn the tables.

There follow more curves than it takes to get to the Shady Rest Hotel, and it takes every bit of ingenuity Bender has to extricate himself, without (too much) collateral damage. If you like Elmore Leonard (and who doesn’t?) but always felt like he could be a little bit funnier and the little bit sharper, give Tim Hallinan a try.