The Bang Devils by Patrick Foss

 

There is a kind of crime fiction that focuses on criminals who are out of their depth--sometimes my a lot, sometimes by enough to seem like idiots; this is very much a book like that, where the protagonists persistently make bad choices as the situation they've put themselves into spirals further and further out of control. While the main characters do not seem like the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, calling them idiots is probably in the direction of unfair--though there is not a single decision they make in the novel that a reasonably alert reader cannot tell is going to make things palpably worse. This is not exactly my favorite kind of crime fiction, mostly because the main characters could have walked away at almost any time and been OK--if there are going to be bad decisions, I very much prefer for the people making them to be under more pressure. The prose has some neat turns, and the story isn't badly told, for all it's not really to my preferences; the various POV characters do kinda blur together, and I'm not sure how I feel about some of the very extended bits of unattributed dialogue: It's not just that there aren't tags, it's literally just the words the characters are speaking and you have to work out one instance of who's talking and sorta propagate that out, the book isn't good enough to reward that amount of work.