BAILING OUT

G, a “stone-cold assassin” for a family-run cartel, wants out, but several players would see him dead first in this masterly thriller.

Ruhl, who previously published Takedown in 2023, begins with some artful misdirection as a man named Ray is compelled to attempt vehicular homicide in a bid to erase his son’s debts to some very bad people. This opening is gripping enough, but Ray’s predicament very quickly takes a back seat to his intended target, G. Folk songs have been written about this near-mythical character who had “taken out most of the major players of a rival cartel five years earlier and had become a legend, even though only a select few knew his name.” But now G is married with a baby on the way. He knows quitting his half uncle’s criminal organization that “makes more profit than Walmart” isn’t as simple as giving two weeks’ notice, and after the attempt on his life, he realizes “alliances had shifted—like they always do….This was no accident. It was a hit. They wanted him dead. This wasn’t over.” But who is “they”? Who can he trust? For G, where there’s a will, there’s a way. There were no lost causes, he muses, because if there were, Carmen would have never married him. Ruhl has a keen eye for scene-setting (“Ray’s ’71 Chevelle sat empty…by the back steps of a tiny house at the end of tire tracks forged in dead dry grass—what passed for a driveway in rural Oklahoma”) and indelible character grace notes (“He was only forty but had more miles on him than his old car”). There are enough twists and turns, suspect alliances, and betrayals to keep readers on edge, and G is a finely etched character who is at once “sensitive” and “an unrelenting, absolute tool of destruction.”

Pulse-pounding action and complex characters.