Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Wrench by Jeremy Brown

Jeremy Brown is the author of several hardboiled military and crime thrillers. The Wrench (Wolfpack Publishing, 2021) is the first in his Bruder Heist series. Bruder is a career thief in the style of Parker, Wilson, and Wyatt, a good addition to the fictional pantheon of professional criminals. Bruder and his colleague Kershaw hear about a $2.5 million dollar cash transaction at an investment firm in New York City and they decide to intercept it. The accountant who relays the information has been directed to find a way to hide the cash from the IRS. Bruder reasonably concludes the transaction is illegal and knows the police won’t be called in. Stealing from people who won’t call the authorities is his favorite kind of gig: he knows all he has to do is take the money and disappear. The only down side he sees is the schedule, which is tighter than he would like, only a week to plan, and Bruder calls in a few men he’s worked with to help.

 

Bruder is a brilliant logistician. He works out a meticulously detailed strategy to relieve the investment firm’s CEO of the bundle of cash in broad daylight in plain view of hundreds of people in the financial district of New York City. Execution is exactly as planned, except the CEO fights to keep the money instead of handing it over to the man with a gun pointed at him. That’s when Bruder learns the money belongs to the Labyrinth, a shadowy crime organization. Its reputation for relentlessness in finding those who cross them is only matched by the ruthlessness with which their enemies are dispatched once located. In seconds the steal becomes far more complicated than anyone imagined.

 

Readers who miss Parker will find Bruder a satisfactory, but not great, replacement. He is callous, brutal, intelligent, and fair; he makes sure that the money is divided as agreed upfront, even when circumstances change. He knows crossing his co-workers will only come back to haunt him. His luddite view of computers is amusing. The early sequence when he tosses someone into a ditch for refusing to give up his telephone lets the reader know that Bruder doesn’t like computers and doesn’t trust anyone who does. The story structure could use some work, though; it lags near the end of the planning sequence, where several pages could have been pruned to create a crisper, tighter effect to match Bruder’s persona. Perhaps the verbosity is overcome in later titles. The second book in the series is available now, and the third is due to be released later this year.

 

·         ASIN: B08YKGKDTM

·         Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing (April 14, 2021)

·         Publication date: April 14, 2021

·         Language: English

·         File size: 3473 KB

 

Aubrey Hamilton ©2021

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.