FAKE MONEY, BLUE SMOKE

Criminal enterprises make strange bedfellows.

A week before his release from a prison in upstate New York, Matt Kubelsky gets a call out of the blue from his high school girlfriend Kelly Haggerty, whom he hasn’t seen in nearly 20 years. She has a sketchy business proposition for him. With no other prospects and despite faint internal alarm bells, he accepts. Can he believe her convoluted tale about Qatar and counterfeiting and art insurance and the superchallenging robbery of a cache of Klimt drawings that she wants him to execute? When she flashes some cash and makes herself sexually available, Matt’s all in. His recent prison stint gives him the connections he needs to hire a ragtag criminal crew, the most menacing of them “the Nazi Bob Wharton.” Haven’s sinuous, fitful plot teeters on the brink of absurdity, zigzagging from Newark to Florida to Montana to Manhattan. Simmering beneath the cross-country caper is the mutual distrust between Matt and Kelly, complicated by their sexual compatibility. The story’s perspective, alternating mostly between the two of them, occasionally expands to include other characters, keeping the reader a tantalizing half-step ahead of the action. The high point comes midway: a hilarious not-so-great train robbery. Rat-a-tat dialogue, concise character delineation, and brisk pacing will remind readers of Elmore Leonard. But Haven also sprinkles diverting sidebars about movies and the art world throughout, from the controversial painter Damien Hirst to the film Casablanca.

A rip-roaring roller coaster ride from a fresh new voice.