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Monty Haaviko, a very bad bad guy, is making an actual clean start in a life full of bad. A career nasty, from the time he was a kid, he's got a wife and child and, as he describes so well, being a criminal is tiring. Being a regular guy is sort of nice. You get to go home to the same place every night. You're not constantly worked up about a fix, or other bad guys. When Haaviko, now Sam Parker (legally changed) kills three young men who attack him in his new home, he's immediately suspected of murder. He's targeted by a vicious cop who has pretty much decided that he'll never be anything but a criminal. It's fairly obvious that Parker truly wishes to be a regular guy. And it's just as obvious that this particular cop, Detective Sergeant Walsh, has it in for him. Walsh may believe that criminals never change but he definitely seems to hate Parker. Big time. He spends time going around the neighborhood warning everyone about the new guy, and suggesting they not hire him. His landlady tries (rather pointlessly) to evict him and a little too much time is taken on Parker's interaction with her. AN ORDINARY DECENT CRIMINAL is a mix of traditional and new, and in that regard, is a mix of successful and bogged-down narrative. Parker is plausible but the author spends no time filling us in on the guy. His desire for a normal life is explained well, but how does a hard-core druggy just quit. Not why but how? And how does he find a loving woman like Claire, who by his own admission, has married and had a kid with someone for whom home life was nothing but hard-core misery? Maybe this will come out in a second book but I really felt I needed to know more about that and less about how to booby-trap a yard, something that took pages and pages. Michael Van Rooy is an amazing talent. He's got a solid future, I believe, if he can work out some of his weaknesses, or find an editor who can help. In a book that was often compelling and smart, there were pages that put me to sleep. Or which I skipped because detailed paragraphs of "how to do bad stuff" or watching violence can be unpleasant and/or boring. And it felt like filler, unnecessary when there were so many things that the author could have been telling us. The set-up for a few scenes just weren't quite plausible enough. I wanted Parker to succeed, but it took work to get there. I had to read through a lot of uneven writing. Again it felt as if Van Rooy spent too much time in the wrong places with the stuff he found fascinating but which didn't move the story forward. I felt like yelling "focus" (the way we used to do in the movies when the projectionist was spacing out). I'd really like it if in the next book, the author explained some of what matters, and tried to spend less time lost in some of the details. § Andi Shechter, who has twice has chaired mystery conventions, has an ancient MA in Criminal Justice and is proud to have appeared in a mystery as a New York runway model.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, August 2010
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