This was a fun crime story. The pacing and plot lend it to a very cinematic feel, which I like a lot. I tend to think in those terms often enough. It’s a fun heist flick that becomes complex and Bug, the main character and wheel man, has to deal with both the fallout from his individual circumstances—his own and southern poverty, in general being a major theme here—as well as powder keg situation that erupts from the heist itself.

This book has good character work. I really liked Bug’s character arc and his reactions to the world around him feel very authentic. His actions really telegraph his inner life, in a way that I think a lot of authors would aspire to. I love the details with the cars as well. I’m just interested in cars enough to find that fun and cool. It strikes a good balance. I don’t think people not into cars will get bored. It’s interspersed enough, and the plot is fast paced enough, that nothing overstays it’s welcome.

So why only 3 stars, right?

This would have easily been 4 stars for me, except I didn’t get on with the writing despite liking the form. The actual prose are serviceable in terms of diction and imagery (when not using similes), but there are some wonky things at the paragraph to paragraph and sentence to sentence level that repeatedly pulled me out of what was happening.

Sentence to sentence the cadence is really repetitive because of the writing style. Short clipped sentences and no meaty long ones create a stilted cadence.

Paragraph to paragraph there’s an issue with stuff editors usually catch. There’s a lot of similes that go against what the paragraph is about. When we first get to see the main characters wheel man skills in action the simile is him gripping the steering wheel like a life preserver. Then it goes on to describe the car as his instrument, and driving is his symphony. Why not… just lean into the vehicle as a musical instrument and then make the shifting happening while driving from the police “notes” being played. It would have been really cool, but instead there’s a dissonance that occurs—and reoccurs often in this fiction—where imagery is summoned with a simile that doesn’t help at all, pulls you out of the fiction, and then the rest of the paragraph continues with something different.

The character pulls a man off of his bed he’s sharing with a woman, who has breasts spilling over her front like an avalanche. For one, it’s a crime story so summoning that image is weird, and it also doesn’t work? She’s stationary and breasts wouldn’t be like that. On the other hand, if her entire body and posture was shaped like an avalanche going down a hill or something, I’d at least kind of understand the figure of the person on the bed and it might be communicating character info that becomes pertinent. But if there is a simile in the book, it’s probably not there for that kind of craft work.

To end on a positive note though, one thing this book absolutely excels at though: action. The sentence to sentence structure, while a clipped cadence in scenes that need to breath, absolutely belong in the action. I’m betting the authors style comes from crafting these kinds of scenes. It imparts just the right amount of information and creates a sort of suspense like feeling when each short sentence comes to an end. It’s like a repeated hook, love that about it.

I think if you come to this expecting commercial fiction you’re gonna love it. It’s more intelligent than something you’d pick up in that setting. It’s got a good marriage of crime/heist that doesn’t lose sight of it just being about action. Clearly it wants you to think about the variables that force these people to live like this and situate them in time and place, in the south. I was expecting more of a literary novel, especially with a cover like that. Had my expectations been more in line and the craft stuff not bothered me, It would be higher rated.