KIDNAPPING STEVE

In Juliano’s punchy crime thriller, a couple of mostly harmless beach bums find themselves wrapped up in an abduction scheme.

Billy Winslow is a small-town cook with big-time aspirations and a sketchy past, with eclectic looks to match. He lives a simple life with his girlfriend, Rita Polli, an ex-model who’s often compared to a goddess. Together, they reside in a humble Florida beach house. When Billy gets fired, he begins working at a different restaurant with Van, his longtime frenemy, who proposes a kidnapping plot to Billy. The plan is simple, so he says: They’ll kidnap Steve, an arrogant teenaged waiter at the restaurant, and hold him for ransom. Surely, Steve’s former pro-wrestler father will pay up before anything goes south; at least that’s what Billy hopes. He isn’t immediately on board with the plan, but his curiosity gets the better of him once he realizes it could provide grist for a best-selling novel. As he writes chapter after chapter, the kidnapping moves ahead. Billy is suspicious of a potential double-cross situation, but he doesn’t quite know what to do, aside from living vicariously through his fictionalized alter ego, Flash Shackelford, a “heavy hitter” who relies on his heroic girlfriend to solve all his problems. Using the sharp prose of an old-timey noir (“In the wet, windswept night, Flash thought about beginnings. He wondered if he’d begun badly, and if he had to end up that way”), the author imbues this narrative with personality. The novel’s colorful cast of characters includes all the staples readers might expect for a devilishly fun heist: a couple of brainless goons, a hulking macho type, a mysterious yet trigger-happy ex-military expert, a drunk screwball simply referred to as “the young bum,” and Keller, a life-sized action figure with a vendetta against Billy. Readers will practically smell the ocean and see the tanned, rippling muscles in Juliano’s gritty Florida caper.

A terrific beach read, filled with romance, revenge, and hilarious commentary on the artist versus the art.