Self-published in 2010; published by Soho Crime on November 13, 2012
Some crime novels are just fun. Crashed is one of those. It's also smart, absorbing, and fast-moving. Timothy Hallinan does everything a writer should do whose goal is to keep a reader entertained from the first sentence to the last.
Crashed was originally self-published as an ebook, apparently because Hallinan's editors at HarperCollins can't recognize good writing when they see it and thus turned it down. Hallinan had the good sense to jump to Soho Crime, which has published Crashed and will soon publish the next two books in the series. The books deserve the wider audience that they'll now have.
Junior Bender is commissioned to steal a painting. The robbery goes spectacularly wrong, culminating in Bender's kidnapping at gunpoint and eventual delivery to Trey Annunziato, a young woman who is managing an enormously profitable criminal enterprise. Trey needs Bender to find out who is sabotaging the most successful porn flick that will ever be made, featuring a former child sitcom star named Thistle Downing. Trey both blackmails and threatens Bender to assure his cooperation.
Who is responsible for the sabotage? Who killed Bender's friend while the friend was watching Thistle's apartment? Why do two girls keep popping up and running away? The story works well as a mystery and it's sufficiently goofy to work as light comedy. One of the mysteries (the killer's identity) is resolved in a surprising way about three-fourths of the way into the novel, quickly followed by an explanation of the two girls. The solution to the mystery of the saboteur's identity isn't entirely unexpected, but the novel's resolution is immensely satisfying.
It's difficult to make a washed-up Hollywood junkie into a sympathetic character, but Hallinan does that with Thistle, in part by giving the reader a glimpse of Thistle's journal, a mad howl of anguish and despair coupled with a sincere desire for a better life, and in part by letting us see Thistle's downfall through the eyes of her sympathetic TV mom (her real mom, by contrast, is a barracuda). Bender, of course, is also a likable character, despite his criminal propensities. He is, in fact, a criminal with a heart, and helping Trey assure that Thistle makes a porn movie she detests causes Bender more than a few moral qualms. Despite the blackmail and threats, the reader knows that Bender will find a way to rescue Thistle.
Crashed is an unusual example of crime fiction in that the story is always believable. While other writers think shock and awe is the key to success, Hallinan knows that solid writing and appealing characters make a novel stand out. Hallinan's prose is lively and clever. This is light entertainment, the sort of novel that's often classed as a beach read, and it's an expertly crafted example of its type. Some of the scenes are played for laughs (Bender swinging from a chandelier, for instance) but Hallinan never goes so far over-the-top that the story loses credibility. Action scenes are underplayed, a refreshing departure from most crime fiction. Some scenes in Crashed are touching, many are amusing, one or two are surprisingly intense, and every bit of the tightly-plotted story is a joy to read.
RECOMMENDED