Crooks by Lou Berney

 

Saw this in the library and I remembered how much I enjoyed Dark Ride, so I checked it out. It's at least as enjoyable, though this is not anything like the "stoner noir" I described Dark Ride as. There's wit and sparkle in the prose, including the dialogue, and the stories here eventually add up to basically what's on the cover--a novel about crime and family. All the kids especially need to come to grips with both those things, and how in their particular instance they're intertwined. And those kids are well-distinguished from each other, both in their POVs and elsewise, Berney does a marvelous job of making it seem as though you're in seven different heads, here (not at once) and that's a real accomplishment. This isn't as intense as some other crime novels I've enjoyed, but I enjoyed it a lot.