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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Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press June 2, 2020

Clean Hands blends a modern financial/corporate espionage thriller with an old-fashioned criminal mob story. Yet at the end, it isn’t either of those. The clever plot travels in unexpected directions. The book might not be a good choice for readers who need a hero they can cheer for — corporate law firms, small-time thugs, and people who play dirty tricks in the clandestine world tend not to win a reader’s heart — but the characters all benefit from well-defined if disagreeable personalities.

Chris Crowley, an associate at the Carlyle firm, has his pocket picked. He loses the iPhone on which he has stored incriminating documents about a client of the firm. His failure to password protect the phone, coupled with videos that show Crowley making eye contact with the pickpocket, lead firm investigator Michael D’Angelo to suspect that Crowley is not telling the whole story.

The head of the firm, Elizabeth Carlyle, freaks out because the documents relate to a bank that is the firm’s key client. The bank is suing another bank and neither financial institution has clean hands. Carlyle is worried that the documents will expose her client, and thus her firm, to major liability. She contacts her go-to outside investigator, Valencia Walker, who promises to recover the phone.

The story follows the phone as it gets passed from one crook to another, and then follows Walker as she follows the trail of people who touched it. The investigation takes her to some small-time criminals who plan to trade the phone for money, but the plot conceals a deeper layer of intrigue. The extortion that the theft sets in motion is part of a more intricate scheme with more powerful players who manipulate characters in surprising ways.

The story never loses credibility despite its byzantine plot. The story is built on smart storytelling rather than meaningless action scenes, yet it moves quickly and cleanly, never bogging down in unnecessary detail. Characters are constructed in the same way, with sufficient background to make them real without burying the reader in unnecessary biographical data.

In the end, Clean Hands depicts Machiavellian characters whose hands are anything but clean, but creates sympathy for their self-involved lives by placing them in compromised situations. The story avoids a predictably happy ending, but there is a satisfying amount of karma in this story of morally ambiguous people who are manipulated by shadowy forces they barely perceive.

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