Ghostman

Review by New York Times Review

When it comes to language, Irish poets place a distant second to the crooks in crime novels. Say you're planning a big bank heist. The crew you recruit for the job is likely to include a jugmarker, the tactical genius who designs these delicate operations; a lip man to deliver the boss's orders; a boxman to crack the safe; a bagman to handle the loot; a wheelman to drive the getaway car; and maybe a couple of buttonmen ("they hurt people") to facilitate the whole enterprise. Roger Hobbs has named GHOSTMAN (Knopf, $24.95) after the most elusive gang member - the guy who makes everything disappear. "I'm very good at what I do," says Jack Delton (not his name, but it'll do). "I've survived because I'm extremely careful. I live alone, I sleep alone, I eat alone. I trust no one." Sexy as that sounds, it's not quite true. Five years earlier, Jack botched an elaborate bank job in Kuala Lumpur, putting him in serious debt to Marcus Hayes, once the master of all jugmarkers and, in Jack's view, "the most brutal man I'd ever met." To shrink his debt, Jack agrees to clean up the mess after another of Marcus's intricately planned robberies - knocking off an armored car full of casino cash - goes bad. How bad? "Bodies everywhere, loot missing, feds circling." That kind of bad. Hobbs, a first-time novelist who's barely out of college but already writing with the poise of an old pro, has put a great deal of wit and ingenuity into Jack's sophisticated professional skills. As someone whose life depends on his ability to operate in plain sight while remaining invisible, Jack is a master at the art of disguise. Give him a bottle of hair dye and the right wardrobe pieces and he can age 20 years, change nationality and walk away with your watch, your wallet and your daughter. But Jack is no common trickster, and his daring criminal exploits are grounded in detailed, well-researched knowledge of all kinds of practical matters, from picking locks to faking the Kazakhstan Crown Diamond. The dangerous mop-up job he's doing for Marcus also involves violence on a grand scale. Lucky for us, Jack's elastic work ethic allows for that too. "No sane person enjoys killing," he concedes, "but it isn't as bad as people make it out to be." Although Hobbs is an assured stylist who favors clean, precise prose, he handles violence with a lyric touch. In a narrative stuffed with gruesome murders, the most graphic death is executed in a gracefully choreographed scene that's remarkably poignant - because it shows Jack in a rare moment of conflict with what appears to be a nascent conscience. Nobody gets a free pass in Denise Mina's sobering novels, not even the white-haired grandfather in GODS AND BEASTS (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99) who's cut down by 10 rounds from an automatic pistol during a post office robbery. After quickly handing his 4-year-old grandson to a stranger, Brendan Lyon, a retired bus driver and a union activist back in the day, steps forward to help fill a canvas bag of money for the robber, who shows his thanks by emptying his gun into the old man. That's only one of the elements Mina weaves into her bleak account of how corruption can poison a city like Glasgow, with its deep economic problems and intransigent class divisions. A popular politician caught in a sex scandal, a petty crook who makes the regrettable mistake of stealing a crime boss's car, two police officers tempted by a stash of drug money, and the strange young man who watched over Brendan's grandson during the robbery all play their fated roles in this thoughtful look at how good people can go bad. There's a grand design to Charles Todd's period novels featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge, a Scotland Yard detective who returned from the battlefields of World War I burdened with a heavy load of survivor's guilt. Each of these elegant mysteries takes Rutledge to some rural district of England scarred by unhealed war wounds and offers him the chance to do penance by solving a crime and restoring justice. This journey of redemption continues in PROOF OF GUILT (Morrow, $25.99) when the inspector is sent to a village in Essex to find a prosperous wine merchant who has gone missing and may be the victim of a murder back in London. With a gentleman's pocket watch as his only clue, Rutledge cuts through the history of a family dynasty to expose the original sin that left later generations fighting a war no one could win. Laughter is a subversive weapon when you live under a repressive regime. That's the take-away lesson from Colin Cotterill's gravely funny novels set in Indochina in the 1970s and honoring the extravagantly colorful life of Dr. Siri Paiboun, the national (indeed, the only) coroner of Laos, "a country without a constitution or a body of laws." In his latest adventure, THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN'T DIE (Soho, $25.95), the irascible Dr. Siri is recently retired, but still a thorn in the side of the Pathet Lao government. Unable to communicate with the dead souls who regularly appear to him, Dr. Siri is delighted to take a tutorial with the bona fide witch engaged by the general in charge of the Ministry of Agriculture to contact the spirit of his dead brother. Since that entails a trip to a provincial region noted for "boat races, beer, views, elephants," as well as romantic cruises up the Mekong, Dr. Siri has no trouble persuading his wife to go along - a fateful decision that contributes a moving chapter to her memoirs. 'I live alone, I sleep alone, I eat alone, says the ghostman. 'I trust no one'.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 24, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* A first novel comes along every few years that clearly separates itself from the field, like Secretariat winning the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths. This year's Secretariat is going to be Ghostman, a propulsive thriller that combines incredible detail and nonstoppable narrative drive. Jack White is the Ghostman, a pseudonymous loner living far off the grid who specializes in disappearing. After a high-level heist, he makes sure that all traces of the caper vanish. Only once, in Kuala Lumpur, did it all go bad. The organizer of that job, a master criminal named Marcus, blames Jack for the fiasco, so when Marcus penetrates Jack's deep cover, it clearly means trouble. But Marcus doesn't want to kill the Ghostman, at least not yet. What Marcus wants is for Jack to even the score by making a botched armored-car robbery in Atlantic City disappear except, of course, for the take, which has itself disappeared but needs to be found. The clock is ticking because if the $1.2 million in freshly minted bills isn't recovered quickly, it will explode. Naturally, there are multiple levels of double- and triple-crosses layered within the premise, and Hobbs tantalizingly reveals them always keeping his hole cards thoroughly vested as he tracks Jack's progress. The suspense builds inexorably, heightened rather than impeded by the supportive detail with which Hobbs undergirds the action (the backstory on those exploding bills, for example, will have readers wondering how a twentysomething author could possibly know what he knows). There's also a jaunty, cat-and-mouse subplot involving Jack and a female FBI agent who may be more interested in Jack than the crime. Comparisons to Lee Child are inevitable here, and surely Hobbs possesses a Child-like ability for first unleashing and then shrewdly directing a tornado of a plot, but he also evokes Elmore Leonard in the subtle interplay of his characters. A triumph on every level. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Knopf knows it has a winner here and is backing Hobbs' debut with the kind of marketing support rarely granted a first novel. Movie rights have been sold to Warner Brothers, and options have been signed by 13 publishers across the globe.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hobbs's strong debut bypasses a potentially over-familiar premise, a lone-wolf crook trying to outwit the underworld's higher powers through sheer verve. Five years after a failed heist in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the protagonist, identified only by the alias "Jack Delton," is leading an anonymous existence, but not enough of one to prevent his former boss, the Moriarty-like Marcus Hayes, from summoning him at a moment's notice. Marcus's latest heist, of an armored car delivering $1.2 million to an Atlantic City casino, has gone badly, bloodily wrong, with one henchman dead and the other in hiding with the loot. Jack must find the survivor in the next 48 hours before an ink bomb hidden in the cash goes off, while also dealing with FBI agent Rebecca Blacker and local kingpin Harrihar "the Wolf" Turner. Though occasionally overloaded with information about criminal procedure, Hobbs's supremely confident storytelling should leave readers eagerly anticipating his antihero's future felonies. 150,000 first printing; 5-city author tour. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In the criminal underworld, there are many specialists needed when pulling a heist. Perhaps the most important is the ghostman, the person responsible for helping perpetrators disappear when the task is done. Unfortunately for the protagonist of this debut thriller, sometimes it's impossible to disappear completely. Several years removed from botching a job in Kuala Lumpur, "Jack" (as he sometimes allows himself to be called) finds himself pressed into service cleaning up a casino robbery in Atlantic City. In less than 48 hours, he has to make the robbery vanish while staying one step ahead of the FBI and a rival crime boss. Verdict The novel is frenetic yet methodical, a police procedural told from the wrong side of the law. With its unpredictable plot and an antihero readers will take a perverse joy in cheering for, this book will attract fans of Lee Child, George Pelecanos, or classic hard-boiled fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 8/9/12.]-Peter Petruski, Cumberland Cty. Lib. Syst., Carlisle, PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An ice-in-his-veins fixer trawls Atlantic City for a missing bundle of cash in this watertight debut thriller. Jack Delton, the hero of this novel--and, presumably, more to come--is a "ghostman," an expert at disappearing and helping others disappear. He's a free agent with a full armory of skills that help him kill a man, cross borders, take on entirely new personalities and be smugly unimpressed with criminal overlords. But his botch of a big-money bank heist in Kuala Lumpur five years ago means he owes a favor to one of those honchos, Marcus, who's looking for a bag of cash that disappeared with a gunman when a casino robbery went sour. The clock's ticking: The bundle is a "federal payload" containing a packet of indelible ink set to explode in 48 hours. Jack is a superb sleuth and an entertaining explainer of the variety of ways one can torment or kill somebody (a jar of nutmeg can be terrifyingly deadly, it turns out), and Hobbs ensures he's in a heap of trouble fast: Marcus is watching closely, and Jack is also in the cross hairs of an FBI agent and a rival criminal, the Wolf, who's guarded by Aryan Brotherhood thugs. Straight out of the gate, Hobbs has mastered the essentials of a contemporary thriller: a noirlike tone, no-nonsense prose and a hero with just enough personality to ensure he doesn't come off as an amoral death machine. Jack loves Ovid, hates heroin and cripples his pursuers--but not so badly that they won't have a chance to come back in a future installment. The federal payload deadline gives the plot its essential urgency, but Hobbs is even better in the Kuala Lumpur interludes--heart-stopping scenes that illustrate how small mistakes can turn catastrophic. A smart entry into the modern thriller pantheon, at once slick and gritty.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Seattle, Washington The shrill, high-­pitched chirp of an incoming e-­mail was like a bell ringing in my head. I woke with a start and immediately put a hand on my gun. I took gasping breaths as my eyes adjusted to the light coming off my security screens. I looked over to the windowsill where I'd set my watch. The sky was still as black as ink. I took the gun out from under my pillow and put it on my nightstand. Breathe. When I regained my composure I scanned the monitors. There was no one in the hallway or the elevator. Nobody in the stairs or the lobby. The only person awake was the night watchman, who looked too engrossed in a book to notice anything. My building was an old ten-­story, and I was on the eighth floor. It was a seasonal sort of place, so there were year-­round occupants in only about half the rooms and none of them ever got up early. Everyone was still asleep, or away for the summer. My computer chirped again. I've been an armed robber for close to twenty years. Paranoia comes with the territory, as well as the stack of fake passports and hundred-­dollar bills under the bottom drawer of my dresser. I started in this business in my teens. I did a few banks because I thought I'd like the thrill of it. I wasn't the luckiest and I'm probably not the smartest, but I've never been caught, questioned or fingerprinted. I'm very good at what I do. I've survived because I'm extremely careful. I live alone, I sleep alone, I eat alone. I trust no one. There are maybe thirty people on earth who know I exist, and I am not sure if all of them believe I'm still alive. I am a very private person out of necessity. I don't have a phone number and I don't get letters. I don't have a bank account and I don't have debts. I pay for everything in cash, if possible, and when I can't, I use a series of black Visa corporate credit cards, each attached to a different offshore corporation. Sending me an e-­mail is the only way to contact me, though it doesn't guarantee I'll respond. I change the address whenever I move to a different city. When I start getting messages from people I don't know, or if the messages stop bearing important information, I microwave the hard drive, pack my things into a duffel and start all over. My computer chirped again. I ran my fingers over my face and picked up the laptop from the desk next to my bed. There was one new message in my in-­box. All of my e-­mails get redirected through several anonymous forwarding services before they reach me. The data goes through servers in Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Thailand before it gets chopped up and sent to accounts all over the world. Anybody tracing the IP wouldn't know which was the real one. This e-­mail had arrived at my first offshore address in Reykjavik some two minutes ago, where the server had encrypted it with my private-­key 128-­bit cipher. From there it had been forwarded to another address registered under a different name. Then another address, then another. Oslo, Stockholm, Bangkok, Caracas, São Paulo. It was daisy-­chained down the line ten times with a copy in each in-­box. Cape Town, London, New York, L.A., Tokyo. Now it was undetectable, untraceable, private and anonymous. The information had circled the world almost twice before it got to me. It was in all these in-­boxes, but my cipher key could unlock only one. I entered my pass code and waited for the message to decrypt. I could hear the hard drive doing a spin-­up and the CPU beginning to work. Five in the morning. Outside the sky was empty, except for a few lights on in the skyscrapers, which looked like foggy constellations. I've never liked July. Where I'm from the whole summer is intolerably hot. The security monitors had browned out for a few seconds the night before, and I had to spend two hours checking them. I opened a window and put my fan next to it. I could smell the shipping yard outside--­old cargo, garbage and salt water. Across the train tracks the bay stretched out like a giant oil slick. That early in the morning, only a half dozen or so headlights cut through the darkness. The fishing boats cast rigger beams over the nets, and the early ferries were setting off from the harbor. The fog rolled in from Bainbridge Island and through the city, where the rain stopped and the cargo express cast a shadow from the track going east. I took my watch off the windowsill and put it on. I wear a Patek Philippe. It doesn't look like much, but it will tell the correct time until long after everyone I've ever known is dead and buried, the trains stop running and the bay erodes into the ocean. My encryption program made a noise. Done. I clicked on the message. The sender's address had been obscured by all the redirects, but I knew instantly who it was from. Of the possibly thirty people who know how to contact me, only two knew the name in the subject line, and only one I knew for sure was alive. Jack Delton. My name isn't really Jack. My name isn't John, George, Robert, Michael or Steven, either. It isn't any of the names that appear on my driver's licenses, and it isn't on my passports or credit cards. My real name isn't anywhere, except maybe on a college diploma and a couple of school records in my safety-­deposit box. Jack Delton was just an alias, and it was long since retired. I'd used it for a job five years ago and never again since. The words blinked on the screen with a little yellow tag next to them to show that the message was urgent. I clicked it. The e-­mail was short. It read: Please call immediately. Then there was a phone number with a local area code. I stared at it for a moment. Normally, when I got a message like this, I wouldn't even consider dialing the number. The area code was the same as mine. I thought about this for a second and came up with two conclusions. Either the sender had been extraordinarily lucky or he knew where I was. Considering the sender, it was probably the latter. There were a few ways he could've done it, sure, but none of them would've been easy or cheap. Just the possibility that I'd been found should have been enough to send me running. I have a policy never to call numbers I don't know. Phones are dangerous. It is hard to track an encrypted e-­mail through a series of anonymous servers. Tracking someone by their cell phone is easy, however. Even regular police can trace a phone, and regular police don't deal with guys like me. Guys like me get the full treatment. FBI, Interpol, Secret Service. They have rooms full of officers for that sort of thing. I looked at the blinking name long and hard. Jack. If the e-­mail were from anyone else, I would've deleted it by now. If the e-­mail were from anyone else, I'd be closing the account and deleting all my messages. If the e-­mail were from anyone else, I'd be frying the computers, packing my duffel and buying a ticket for the next flight to Russia. I'd be gone in twenty minutes. But it wasn't from anyone else. Only two people in the world knew that name. I stood up and went to the dresser by my window. I pushed aside a pile of money and a yellow legal pad full of notes. When I'm not on a job, I translate the classics. I pulled a white shirt out of the drawer, a gray two-­piece suit from the closet and a leather shoulder holster from my dresser. I fished a little chrome revolver from the box on top: a Detective Special with the trigger guard and hammer spur filed off. I filled it with a handful of .38 hollow points. When I was dressed and ready, I took out an old prepaid international phone, powered it up and punched in the numbers. The phone didn't even ring. It just went right to connection. "It's me," I said. "You're a hard man to find, Jack." "What do you want?" "I want you to come to my clubhouse," Marcus said. "Before you ask, you still owe me." Excerpted from Ghostman by Roger Hobbs All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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