Friends Helping Friends by Patrick Hoffman

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 18, 2025

Friends Helping Friends tells an unusual crime story. For that reason alone, the novel is better than its more predictable competitors.

The novel’s first half focuses on Bunny Simpson, Jerry LeClair, and Helen McCalla. Helen is a lawyer who has issues with her ex-husband and his new wife. Helen pours her heartbreak into exercise, then scores steroids from a gym rat to fuel her workout body obsession.

Helen hears the words You will not be okay until you make him pay, a message she attributes to God rather than steroid-induced psychosis. Helen wants to have her ex roughed up without doing serious damage. The gym rat connects her with Jerry, who enlists the help of his friend Bunny. Both guys need money, but this isn’t their typical line of work. They confront Helen’s ex in a park and are surprised when he fights back. Bunny comes to the defense of Jerry and does just enough damage to get himself arrested.

ATF Agents Howley and Gana visit Bunny in jail. They threaten him with a lengthy sentence but promise to help him avoid the consequences of his crimes if he’ll go undercover in their investigation of Bunny’s uncle. Bunny knows his Uncle Willard served some time for manslaughter but doesn’t know the details. He hasn’t seen Willard in years.

The ATF agents are vague about the nature of their investigation — they mention conspiracy and racketeering — but they tell Bunny that Willard is leading a Christian Identity group of white supremacists. Snitching on Willard doesn’t appeal to Bunny until they promise him a payment of $100 a day. Bunny’s lawyer should know better than to trust ATF agents but he tells Bunny to take the deal.

At ATF’s direction, Bunny takes a janitorial job with a used car dealer where his uncle makes occasional appearances, perhaps in connection with the used car dealer’s drug dealing.. Pretending to meet his uncle by chance, Bunny takes a job on his uncle’s ranch, where he sees young men training with firearms. He knows they are planning a major operation but the ATF agents only seem to be interested in recovering a notebook that Willard keeps in his safe. The novel’s second half follows Bunny’s effort to recover the notebook, his discovery of its purpose, and his hapless attempt to rip off Willard and foil the ATF agents.

Bunny and Jerry are affable losers, the kind of young men who have big dreams and little hope of achieving them. They don’t shy away from hard work but they are attracted to the possibility of easy money. It is in their nature to assume that attractive women are essentially good (a bad assumption to make if you’re a character in a crime novel). As earnest and uncomplicated dudes with reasonably good hearts, they easily win the reader’s sympathy. Helen is ambitious and petty, making her a good foil to the protagonists, but she’s likable in her own way.

The plot is a fun mixture of light and dark. The bad guys are evil but a bit bumbling. The novel’s violence is not particularly graphic although it features one of those "his head exploded in front of me" scenes that have become ubiquitous in crime stories. The story moves in unexpected directions as it nears the end -- it almost turns into a road novel -- but surprises are telegraphed by earlier events, so Patrick Hoffman plays fair with the reader. Early scenes that seem important to the story turn out to be relatively inconsequential while events that seem insignificant are important by the end.

The final bro bonding scene is a bit sappy and the conclusion is improbably happy. Those aren’t really complaints. The protagonists deserve a happy ending, so even if it stretches the boundaries of plausibility, I don’t care. Set against a disturbing backdrop of white straight male supremacy, a happy ending for decent people is a good way for the story to end.

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