5. Strip by Thomas Perry

I found this hardback Bibliotheque Mile-End (now Bibliotheque Mordecai-Richler) discard on the ever-fertile free shelf on St-Viateur and grabbed it because I liked the premise and it looked easy to read.  I guess Thomas Perry is a very successful thriller writer, including having an entire series.  I had never heard of him before.

It starts out great.  A guy who seems to be the protagonist is hiding out in the high cabin on a crane on a major high-rise construction site.  We don't know much about him except that he is on the run and hiding and is capable of breaking into constructions sites to sleep in crane cabins while learning how to operate them solely by reading the manual.  Though the action here was way over the top (he defends himself against 4 thugs and two SUVS with the crane), the writing had a nice stripped-down style with evocative suggestions of skill that I enjoy.  I got a little ahead of myself thinking I had discovered a new Richard Stark, but the beginning had that hardness.

The premise is that this guy, Joe Carver, is new in town and was spending a lot of cash in strip clubs and was thus fingered as the stick-up man who robbed the owner of those clubs.  Quite quickly, the narrative threads spin off in several directions and we follow the quite a few storylines, so many that it is not really clear until the end who is the actual protagonist.  As well as Joe, we follow the story of the savvy and hard but older strip club owner, his driver, the detective investigating and the real guy who did the stick-up.  So what starts out as a focused idea of the innocent badass trying to get the badguys off of his trail and then having to turn to ass-kicking morphs into more of a broad crime mosaic, focused ultimately on the club owner.  It was all fairly enjoyable, though at times quite implausible, especially the recurring ease with which guys got laid by hot and interesting but complicated (putting it mildly) women.

I found the ending somewhat dissatisfying.  It felt mean-spirited from what came before and also had a specifically nasty touch that I also felt didn't quite belong.  So I would have to say from a critical pespective that the book doesn't succeed in landing all the planes it launched and it may have been better to have started out with fewer take-offs.  The Joe Carver character, though he has a partial backstory is almost a maguffin, which is confusing as he starts out the book.  Despite that, it was quite fun to read and a real page-turner.   I also appreciated the detailed view on the backroom workings of strip clubs, felt very realistic.  I will definitely pick up his other books, when I run across them.