Pro Bono by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on January 14, 2025

When Charlie Warren was a teen, his mother Linda started dating Mack Stone. Perhaps put off by a name that sounds like the invention of a bottom shelf thriller writer, Charlie never got along with Mack, even after he married his mom. Then he discovered that Mack was stealing money from his mother’s accounts. Mack nearly burned down the family home as he made his escape, but Charlie miraculously put out the fire, used a borrowed car to chase down Mack, and ran him off the road where he crashed into a tree.

As Charlie is driving away from the scene of the crash, he passes an oncoming bus full of prisoners who are fighting fires. The bus stops at the crash scene and two of the prisoners — Andy Minkeagan and Alvin Copes — recover Mack’s documents from the truck, including records of his stolen investments and convenient proof of his actual identity. The prisoners see Charlie’s face as he speeds past and deduce that he caused the crash, a deduction of Sherlockian power. That coincidental encounter sets the scene for the rest of the story.

In the present, Charlie is a lawyer who specializes in recovering hidden funds, usually in the context of divorce. Vesper Ellis retains him after noticing that three years after her husband’s death, someone using his identity has been withdrawing funds from his investment accounts. Charlie is a CPA as well as a lawyer, so he quickly confirms that there is something fishy about the accounts held by two different firms.

The financial thieves who stole from Vesper are married to two sisters — May and Rose — who enjoy the lifestyles their crooked husbands provide. Thomas Perry provides no convincing reason to believe that the sisters would be murderous, yet they need to be to keep the plot in motion. The sisters have a brother named Peter who turns up from time to time without adding anything of significance to the story.

Most of the story is dedicated to Charlie’s efforts to recover Vesper’s stolen money, as well as additional sums to keep the firms’ wrongdoing confidential. For reasons that only make sense to Charlie, he does this pro bono rather than taking a third of the millions he manages to recover for Vesper. A lawyer can’t shag a current client so he isn’t motivated by sex, although Vesper clearly wants to give him a naked reward for his efforts.

The rest of the plot relates to the money stolen from Charlie’s mother. As Charlie chases the crooked husbands, he enlists the help of Andy and Alvin, who have been released from prison and plan to force Charlie to help them access his mother’s stolen funds. To foil their scheme, Charlie has to become a tough guy superhero. He just doesn’t seem the type, creating yet another plot point that I couldn’t accept.

Even less probable is Charlie’s plan to reform the criminals by putting them on his payroll with the promise that they’ll get a fair share of the money after Charlie recovers it. Now I'm all in favor of reforming criminals, but I'm not willing to employ two ex-cons after they point their guns at me. Charlie's saintly qualities are a bit much in a guy who murdered a man for swindling his mother.

Obligatory action scenes justify the novel’s marketing as a thriller, culminating in a plan by the sisters to protect their husbands by befriending Charlie’s mother and then doing away with her. Like Charlie, Linda has an improbable knack for avoiding death. A final improbability involves Charlie’s uncanny knowledge that his mother will need rescuing despite the absence of any reason to fear for her safety.

The plot of Pro Bono is mildly interesting because it focuses on financial crime rather than the typical thriller obsession with serial killers. The coincidences and strains in logic that drive the plot are the novel’s most serious flaw, but the flaw is so often repeated that it detracts from Perry’s effort to build suspense.

Perry always writes in a plodding style, making the success of his novels turn on whether he tells an intriguing story. Pro Bono is sufficiently intriguing to earn a guarded recommendation, but I won’t be putting it high on my list of 2025 thriller recommendations.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Hero by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on January 16, 2024

The setup to Hero is simple. Justine Poole (the name she adopted for work) is a bodyguard employed by a private security company in Los Angeles. Most of her clients are celebrities. While protecting an aging celebrity couple from a home invasion, she fights off five armed burglars and kills two of them. Painting her as a hero, the media would like to make Justine a short-term celebrity. Unfortunately for Justine, the man who employed the home invaders wants to send a message. He hires a skilled assassin to kill Justine.

It seems improbable to me that a criminal who hires flunkies to carry out home invasions would worry about adverse publicity when some of his flunkies are killed by a security guard. I wasn’t persuaded that the boss would worry that his reputation would be impaired because his flunkies screwed up. Still, the premise is necessary to set the action in motion and it’s no more improbable than the setups of most modern thrillers.

For reasons beyond her control, Justine is fired from her job. Her former colleagues are forbidden from contacting her. The assassin kills a couple of people she knows while trying to kill her. Justine can’t reach out to friends for help without endangering them.

The criminal mastermind orchestrates an unlikely public relations campaign that make the police unwilling to help Justine, even when they know a killer is pursuing her. Consequently, Justine must rely on her wits and training to elude a killer who seems to anticipate her every move.

Most of the novel consists of chases through buildings and streets in LA. They aren’t particularly original but they’re fun. Who doesn’t love a chase scene?

Justine manipulates a guy into giving her a short-term place to stay. The guy tries to manipulate her for reasons of his own. The novel seems to foreshadow Justine falling in love with him but, if that’s going to happen, it will happen after the story ends. I appreciated Thomas Perry’s decision not to let a cheesy romance get in the way of chases and shootouts.

Perry’s prose is efficient, the story moves quickly, and while Justine doesn’t have much of a personality, she doesn’t need one. She just needs to keep her wits about her long enough to survive. Hero is an unremarkable thriller, but it is entertaining. Maybe January isn’t the right month for a beach read, but thriller fans who can’t wait for summer won’t be disappointed if they read it now.

RECOMMENDED

Eddie's Boy by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on December 1, 2020

Eddie’s Boy is the fourth book in Thomas Perry’s Butcher’s Boy series. It should probably be the last. Perry coasts through this one because the series has run out of gas.

Some thugs travel to England where they try to kill Michael Schaeffer but Schaeffer kills the assailants first. Schaeffer reasonably concludes that his life is in danger so he leaves his lady love in England and travels to Australia where more thugs try to kill him (multiple times) before he kills them first (multiple times). To get to the bottom of the assassination attempts, Schaeffer returns to the US, taking time to recount memories of and life lessons supplied by Eddie, the mentor who adopted him and taught him how to be a contract killer. Some of the memories seem random and disconnected from the story (particularly the women who seduced him as he was delivering their meat).

Most of the life lessons involve killing people, survival, and killing people to survive. Eddie was a butcher so Schaeffer also learned how to sharpen knives. Eddie had a buddy teach Schaeffer to assemble a gun while blindfolded, an important thriller world skill that comes in handy if an adversary blindfolds the thriller hero and leaves a dissembled gun within his reach. That must happen surprisingly often since every thriller hero learns how to assemble guns while blindfolded. I guess readers are supposed to be impressed.

Schaeffer easily figures out who wants him dead. In fact, everything comes easily to Schaeffer, from killing multiple people at a time to breaking into houses (in one case, by reaching through a dog door to unlock the door latch — how long are this guy’s arms?) to hiding in an unidentified spot that keeps him from being discovered during the (apparently cursory) search of a barn. Even bringing Schaeffer’s plan to fruition is remarkably easy. The plot builds little tension because Schaeffer is never challenged.

Some of the flashbacks are tedious. Let’s face it: every gun range story is the same gun range story. Other stories involve killing lots of people. Those are tedious only because the killings aren’t terribly original. Even the descriptions of shagging housewives while making meat deliveries are a bit lackluster.

Part of the problem with Eddie’s Boy and Thomas Perry novels in general is that Perry writes in a journalistic style that has no flair. His prose is clear but the narrative has a plodding quality. The novel lacks energy. In a story that’s filled with murders and memories of murders, it feels like nothing happens. That’s not a good sign in a thriller.

Despite Perry’s writing style, I like his novels when he delivers a clever and credible plot. He doesn’t do that in Eddie’s Boy. The reason the evil guy has for ordering Schaffer’s death is unconvincing. The plot holds no surprises. I’m on the fence about making this a “Not Recommended,” but the story moves quickly and has some mildly interesting moments. Still, it isn’t a book I would put high on a TBR list.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on December 17, 2019

A Small Town is a vigilante story. To make vigilantism seem justified, thriller writers concoct dastardly crimes committed by evil villains so that readers will root for the vigilantes. In the logic of thrillerworld, if bad guys are bad enough, it’s okay for good guys to murder them. It isn’t surprising that Thomas Perry made one of the killers a psychotic racist cult leader because even liberals would agree that it is morally correct to murder a racist, right? Wrong. The protagonist’s stunning hypocrisy might make her an interesting character if her character flaws were recognized and explored, but Perry wants the reader to cheer on a serial killer who never pauses to consider whether being a serial killer might be morally blameworthy. I just can't root for shallow protagonists.

The bad guys in this story are federal prisoners who commit an improbable escape, killing a bunch of corrections officers and arming themselves in the process. Mind you, this is a minimum-to-medium security prison, the kind that houses tax evaders and people who commit credit card fraud, but we’re told that hardcore criminals were transferred there because more secure prisons were overcrowded. It isn’t clear that the hardcore criminals even committed federal crimes (murder is usually a state crime), but put that aside. Violent criminals with years left to serve don’t get sent to a federal prison with a low security level, even at the request of a blackmailed Bureau of Prisons bureaucrat, making the premise hard to swallow. But the setup isn’t nearly as difficult to buy into as the plot that follows.

In the two years since the prison break, the FBI hasn’t managed to find any of the twelve worst bad guys (perhaps not surprising since that duty would primarily fall upon the U.S. Marshals). Our hero, a detective named Kate, decides to resign from her small-town cop job so she can track down the twelve escapees and go full vigilante on them. Can this plucky small-town cop succeed where federal agents cannot? You know that answer to that question. In fact, she manages to find them rather easily and dispatches them without working up a sweat. The feds were apparently too dim to consider some of the obvious steps she takes to find the killers.

Kate takes the crime spree personally because her lover (married to a woman with MS so we’re supposed to forgive him for having an affair) was a casualty of the bad guys. That’s one of many contrivances designed to manipulate the reader into cheering for Kate despite her decision to betray everything a law enforcement officer should believe in by becoming a serial killer. I didn’t find either her cause or her character to be noble.

Apart from being a serial killer, Kate carries an illegal “numberless Glock” with an illegal “silencer screwed on.” Where does she get her illegal weaponry? More importantly, why does a police officer who should be dedicated to arresting people who violate firearms laws feel no qualms about violating them herself? The moral seems to be that if you think you have a good justification to break the law, it’s just fine to do so. The prisoners probably felt justified in escaping, but Kate believes her justification is superior to theirs. The prisoners and Kate are both wrong. We are a country of laws precisely to prevent people like Kate from becoming their own law.

Even less believable is that Kate’s quest is funded by the mayor and city council members who redirect a crime fighting grant to her personal use. I found it hard to swallow that so many people, even in a small town where leaders tend to be like-minded, would willingly conspire to commit federal and state felonies by misusing a federal grant to fund a contract killer. The mind simply boggles.

A vigilante novel needs to do something special to earn my recommendation. Perry has never been a gifted wordsmith, although he sometimes tells a good story. A Small Town does nothing to overcome its shallow premise. The narrative suffers from redundancy, as the reader is frequently reminded just how awful the criminals are, how much they deserve to die, and how the small town suffered in the aftermath of the violent prison break. The sentences devoted to those topics are an exercise in tedium. A good bit of the novel reads like padding, as Perry supplies mundane details that do nothing to create atmosphere or advance the plot.

I was amused by some of the novel’s observations, including a character’s realization after dedicating eight years to a religious cult that all he had to show for it was “a marginal life in the woods.” But the novel’s few moments of entertainment fail to offset a dull and predictable story about a remarkably hypocritical character.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Burglar by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/The Mysterious Press on January 8, 2019

Elle Stowell is 24 and, as the novel’s title suggests, a burglar. She enters homes in places like Bel Air and departs with jewels and other things that are small and worth stealing. While committing her most recent burglary, however, she discovers three dead bodies on a king size bed, each with a bullet hole in the head. A camera conveniently recorded the murders. Fearing that it might also have recorded her, Elle steals the camera, but her conscience forces her to return it after erasing the footage in which she appears.

Elle soon finds herself being chased, stalked, and attacked by a variety of strangers. She decides, for reasons that turn out to be plausible, that she should investigate the murders as a way of protecting herself. Her investigation (which relies heavily on her ability to break into buildings) leads her to uncover a criminal scheme that, while unlikely, is at least creative.

In the novel’s most bothersome scene, Elle eavesdrops on a conversation in which a criminal explains details of the scheme to another criminal who already knows those details, for no good reason other than to educate Elle (and the reader). That’s a poor writing technique, although it’s common enough among authors of B-level thrillers. Thomas Perry knows that the criminal has no need to impart information that the other criminal already has, but tries to cover that up by suggesting that the explanation amounts to “stalling” despite the absence of any clear reason to stall. The situation that leads to the explanation is plainly contrived to allow Elle (and the reader) to learn details that are central to resolving the plot. I didn’t buy the contrivance — nor did I buy that the criminals waited to reveal important information until after Elle returned from two breaks she had to take during her eavesdropping — but that’s my only large gripe about The Burglar.

Other gripes: Elle is likable enough but has little depth; the other characters have none at all. Perry’s writing style has little style; it is straightforward to the point of being sterile. Perry is very much a Joe Friday, “just the facts” writer. That kind of writing can be effective when a writer knows how to jazz up the prose, but Perry has never managed to elevate his game.

Still, Perry often conjures up a decent plot and he does that again in The Burglar. The story moves quickly and the breaking-and-entering scenes create enough tension to keep the reader engaged. As is often true of a Thomas Perry novel, the positives outweigh the negatives, but not by much.

RECOMMENDED