Not bad for the price, but not a great book Pretty typical action crime fiction. Good guy hero with some personal problems comes to the rescue of damsel in distress. Makes for a quick read, but nothing memorable about this story.
Do-gooder hoes a hard row Officer Matt Worth of the Omaha Police Department is at a personal and career nadir. Recently divorced, he's now on a provisional assignment guarding the theft-prone SaveMore supermarket pending a psychological fitness sign-off after having slugged the Homicide detective that stole his wife. But even in that punch-up, satisfaction was muted as the other guy was the better hitter. In any case, Worth's only current job satisfaction is flirting with the pretty check-out girl, Gwen. But Gwen has an abusive boyfriend, Russell T. James, whom she bludgeons to death with a bedside table lamp while he sleeps after giving her a particularly nasty beating. With no one to turn to but Matt, she shows him her bruises at the hospital ER then the body back at the apartment. Sympathizing with her predicament, Worth decides not to make an arrest but rather to permanently eradicate Russell's corpse and live at let live. It seemed like the right and gentlemanly thing to do at the time.
What Worth doesn't know is that James was employed as a narcotics and drug money courier by Eddie Tice, owner of Tice Is Nice Quality Used and Discount Furniture, who also has two local plain clothes cops on the take. That, and the $260 K gone missing with Russell, makes for an escalating set of complications for the chivalrous Worth.
Worth, who's a perfectly average shmoe both in his personal and professional life, riding a bad situation into a disaster exemplifies one of my personal favorite adages, which is that No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. If you insist on acting out of the goodness of your heart, either do it with complete anonymity or be prepared for an unacceptable gain/loss ratio.
If life imitates art, or vice versa, then THE CLEANUP, a delightfully entertaining piece of unpretentious lit noir, certainly illustrates the Law of Unintended Consequences. Moreover, it's a conveniently quick read, after which you can go back to saving the world.
Working class fiction! I was told about Sean Doolittle by another writer who recommended his work. So I bought THE CLEANUP because the description made it look like a good start. Indeed! The really great thing about this book is that the characters are all working class folk. Grocery store clerks, laborers, beat cops, carpenters, slackers, etc. This is not a thriller packed with holier-than-thou professional types from the upper crust of society. I liked that about this book, plus the fact that it was just by-gosh so well written. I very highly recommend this book, and I'll be looking out for Doolitle's other novels!
Tightly Woven This is one of the finest paperbacks I've read in years. Sean Doolittle equals Elmore Leonard at his own genre, by which I mean that the dialogue is superbly realistic and the plot moves swiftly along. There are no dull and pointless passages of description (as in Patricia Cornwell) that you're tempted to skip, nor is someone described on each page as lighting a cigarette (as in Patricia Cornwell), nor is there any rhapsodizing over what music the protagonist is listening to. My only complaint is that the anticlimactic ending seems to fall apart and seems hastily thrown together as if Doolittle had to meet a deadline.
Although the novel closely resembles the crime fiction of Elmore Leonard, it made me recall Patricia Highsmith's A Dog's Ransom (Open Market Edition). In both novels, a naïve and good-natured young cop stumbles into trouble, then things get worse, then they get real bad.Well written A fast moving thriller/mystery that is fast-paced, cleverly written and well plotted. The hero is less fun than the villians and that alone makes it an interesting change of pace. But the way the author keeps you privy to his thinking as he reacts to events makes him a lot more credible than most of his type. Enjoyed it.
