Crashed

Crashed is the 2012 debut of Timothy Hallinan's Junior Bender series, and I think it is one of the most genuinely funny crime novels of the last fifteen years. Junior is a professional burglar in Los Angeles who has been quietly running a sideline as an investigator for other criminals, in the kind of role only someone with his particular standing could fill: a fixer for problems that cannot go through legitimate channels. The job that opens Crashed is the rescue of a former child star who is now being blackmailed during the shoot of a porn film a criminal is attempting to coerce her into.

What Hallinan does with this premise is the right thing. Junior is genuinely competent, genuinely funny, and genuinely moral within the bounds of his particular profession. The plot accumulates the kind of comic-thriller machinery that Donald Westlake perfected, with Junior trying to manage half a dozen escalating problems simultaneously and his ex-wife and teenage daughter providing the emotional anchor.

The LA geography is rendered with the kind of affection that the form rewards. The supporting cast (Junior's mentor Herbie, the dangerous Russian client Trey Annunziato) earn their pages. The closing chapters are some of the most satisfying I read in any 2012 crime novel.

Five stars. The right entry point to a sequence of comic-crime novels that deserve a much wider readership. Recommended without reservation.