A review by maedo
The Smack by Richard Lange
4.0
Working at a bookshop after college, I was expected to be able to recommend a book for any taste. The hardest sort of book for me to recommend to customers was anything in the thriller genre. Classic noir/pulp/detective novels were always a little too sanitized to capture my interest, and current thrillers that I've tried tend to suffer from cardboard characters and cliched dialogue.
I wish that I had known about Richard Lange when I was a bookseller, because without question, he would be my go-to recommendation. If you like crime novels about cons, heists, and chases as opposed to whodunits, you have got to read his books. I was genuinely excited to be offered a galley of this latest in exchange for review by Mulholland Books (and I was glad to receive it on the eve of a weekend where I had nothing planned, because I expected to be lost in it).
As it turns out, The Smack is just as totally engrossing as Angel Baby, and has the unsparing, realistically unsentimental worldview that I was stunned by in Sweet Nothing. Lange continues to impress as a writer who can convey that world of tacky superficial wealth masking day-to-day sadness and just getting by that belongs to gamblers by profession and conmen (if you've been to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, you know exactly the vibe I'm talking about) in a way that seems true, not cheesy. The Smack's antihero Rowan Petty, who spends his days scamming people on Airbnb in between bigger jobs, and his unlikely prostitute girlfriend Tinafey, seem like real people; they could easily have become cartoons in the hands of lesser writers. It helps that Lange has a great ear for dialogue and his prose is so good as to be transparent.
I don't want to say too much about the plot, because 1.) frankly, you can read the book's description for that, and 2.) I don't want to spoil the story's turns. Needless to say, there are a few punch to the gut moments (see what I said above about "unsparing, realistically unsentimental worldview"). There is no guarantee anyone is going to make it out alive by some deus ex machina. True to the world of the conman, there is no guarantee that someone else isn't running a double con.
I gave this four stars, but it's a high four stars, leaning closer to five than four. I will read anything Lange writes in the future. He is criminally underrated.
I wish that I had known about Richard Lange when I was a bookseller, because without question, he would be my go-to recommendation. If you like crime novels about cons, heists, and chases as opposed to whodunits, you have got to read his books. I was genuinely excited to be offered a galley of this latest in exchange for review by Mulholland Books (and I was glad to receive it on the eve of a weekend where I had nothing planned, because I expected to be lost in it).
As it turns out, The Smack is just as totally engrossing as Angel Baby, and has the unsparing, realistically unsentimental worldview that I was stunned by in Sweet Nothing. Lange continues to impress as a writer who can convey that world of tacky superficial wealth masking day-to-day sadness and just getting by that belongs to gamblers by profession and conmen (if you've been to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, you know exactly the vibe I'm talking about) in a way that seems true, not cheesy. The Smack's antihero Rowan Petty, who spends his days scamming people on Airbnb in between bigger jobs, and his unlikely prostitute girlfriend Tinafey, seem like real people; they could easily have become cartoons in the hands of lesser writers. It helps that Lange has a great ear for dialogue and his prose is so good as to be transparent.
I don't want to say too much about the plot, because 1.) frankly, you can read the book's description for that, and 2.) I don't want to spoil the story's turns. Needless to say, there are a few punch to the gut moments (see what I said above about "unsparing, realistically unsentimental worldview"). There is no guarantee anyone is going to make it out alive by some deus ex machina. True to the world of the conman, there is no guarantee that someone else isn't running a double con.
I gave this four stars, but it's a high four stars, leaning closer to five than four. I will read anything Lange writes in the future. He is criminally underrated.