Multiple award-winning author
Lou Berney has produced another strikingly original piece of crime fiction in Crooks
(William Morrow, September 2025). Starting in 1961 and ending in 2015, Crooks
describes the lives of a pair of career criminals and their five children, who
each absorb quite different lessons from their felonious upbringing.
Following the career path of
his father who was part of the Chicago criminal organization and his
grandfather who ran moonshine, Buddy Mercurio becomes a low-level trooper in the
Las Vegas underworld, where he is always looking for a corner to cut and a mark
to hustle. He meets Lillian, a skilled swindler, and they marry, producing a
family in short order: Ray, Jeremy, Alice, Tallulah, and Paul. As soon as the
children were old enough, Ray pulled them into his schemes, teaching them the
ins and outs of fleecing innocent civilians. Some 10 years into this life,
Buddy falls out with his management and he has barely enough warning to pack
the children with a few clothes and escape. They go to Lillian’s old family
home in Oklahoma, where no one would think to look for them and they build
their own fraudulent empire.
The succeeding sections are
given over to each of the children and how they interpreted the lawless lessons
Buddy taught them and incorporated them into their adult lives. The older ones
almost had no alternative to taking up lawbreaking as a career.
An intriguing history as the
story starts in freewheeling Las Vegas of the 1950s and moves into the disco
era of the 1970s then to 1980s Hollywood where everyone is running a con of
some kind and the real estate rush of the 2000s in the Southwest.
The maxim that each child views
his or her parents differently from other siblings despite their shared upbringing
and shared experiences is shown plainly here. Jeremy, his parents’ golden
child, soaked up their bent view of morality like a sponge, Alice rejected it,
and Paul didn’t remember it at all.
Starred review from Publishers
Weekly. One of the Amazon Editors' Picks for September Best Mystery,
Thriller & Suspense. I found this book compulsively readable and finished
it in a matter of hours. Recommended.
·
Publisher:
William Morrow
·
Publication
date: September 9, 2025
·
Language:
English
·
Print
length: 384 pages
·
ISBN-10:
0063445573
· ISBN-13: 978-0063445574
Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/482S4HS
Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025
Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who
works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.
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