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Overview
Andrew Vachss returns with a mesmerizing novel about a hard-core thief who’s about to embark on a job that will alter his life forever.
Sugar is that rarest of commodities: an old-school professional thief, tough and loyal as a pit bull, packing 255 pounds of muscle. When he’s picked out of a photo array in a vicious rape case, the cops find his apartment empty. A stakeout catches Sugar when he returns . . . carrying a loaded pistol. The sex-crime cops get nothing from their interrogation, but a streetwise detective figures out why Sugar offers no alibi: at the time of the rape, a holiday-weekend break-in job was being pulled at a jewelry store. The DA offers Sugar two options: give up his partners in the jewelry heist and walk, or plead to the rape he didn’t commit—and he’ll toss in the gun charge. For Sugar, that’s not two options; he takes the weight.
When Sugar finishes his time, his money is waiting for him, held by Solly, the mastermind behind the jewelry heist. But Solly tells Sugar that one of the heist crew was actually sent by another planner—and that planner has just died. In Sugar’s world, all loose threads must be cut. He suspects that there’s more to this job than what Solly is telling him. But nothing he suspects or imagines can prepare him for what he finds . . .
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
At the start of this tepid stand-alone from Vachss (Haiku), professional thief Tim "Sugar" Caine finds himself in an interesting dilemma--a rape victim has mistakenly identified him as her attacker, but he hesitates to tell the cops the truth because he was participating in a jewel robbery at the time. The canny ex-con figures that if he does time for the sex crime, he will evade scrutiny for the crime he did commit. Caine ends up serving a five-year sentence for sexual assault before he's back on the New York City streets, where he reconnects with Solly Vizner, the man who put the jewel heist together. Most of the book concerns Caine's efforts to track down another member of the crew who Vizner fears could squeal on everyone else, but a less than exciting lead and a slow-moving plot make this one of Vachss's weaker crime novels. (Nov.)Kirkus Reviews
A criminal who's spent five years in prison for a crime he didn't commit finds that life on the outside is just as violent and unfair.
Timothy (Sugar) Caine is a pro's pro, a methodical thief built like a stone wall who's forsworn violence on the job. Even though a rape victim has picked his mug shot from a photo array, there's no way he could be her assailant. Sugar knows it; the cops know it; even the victim would probably know it if she took a good close look at his mismatched eyes. But when the NYPD detectives who found him packing heat ask for his alibi, he clams up for the best reason in the world—he doesn't want to confirm their assumption that he was part of a crew that was robbing a jewelry store instead. Unwilling to give up his confederates—Solomon Vizner, who set up the job; Big Matt, the engineer; and Abner Jessop, the newbie Solly's old friend Albie had vouched for—Sugar elects to take the weight for the rape instead. Five uncomplaining years later, he emerges from prison expecting a warm welcome and a big payoff from Solly. He gets the first, but in lieu of the second, Solly sics him on Jessop, who's taken off for the Sunshine State, where Solly also hopes to recover a little blue book Albie left behind when he departed to join the heavenly choir. Under the Florida sun, Sugar tracks Jessop with the help of Albie's girlfriend Rena Rosenberg, but not before he and Rena have formed a uniquely salt-and-pepper relationship that begins in mutual wariness and moves through mutual back-scratching to sexual congress to something altogether richer and more unexpected. The ensuing chain of bait-and-switch seems to have been plotted by someone with a truly fiendish interest in frustrating his hero.
Even in the absence of his signature tough-guy hero Burke, Vachss (Haiku, 2009, etc.) is just as macho, jaundiced and relentlessly didactic about what a hard, hard world it is.