HOT PLASTIC

Craig’s second (The Martini Shot, 1998) is an awkward combination of caper, picaresque, and crime novel.

Jerry Swift is a middle-aged West Coast con man old-fashioned enough to believe that disarming a mark with a phony smile trumps the technological wizardry of the “new breed of grifter” (it’s the 1980s). His 14-year-old son Kevin insists on joining his dad on the road, and, when Kevin gets a fever, Jerry hires Colette, a teenaged prostitute, to baby-sit him. The youngsters team up to help Jerry with his credit card scams, which involve moving large quantities of stolen goods across country to be fenced. Colette teaches the already smitten Kevin how to shoplift, while Jerry educates Colette, when he’s not humping her, on the nuances of grifting; the kid is a natural. Lovable rogues these guys are not. Craig tries to walk a fine line, making his trio hard-edged while retaining some reader sympathy for them. The story is primarily Kevin’s, especially once he’s on his own—meaning after Colette absconds with their ill-gotten gains and Jerry does time for forgery, etc. But who is Kevin? Happy-go-lucky kid with a skateboard? Lone wolf working on techno projects? Gregarious street punk? He morphs from one to the other as the episodes pile up. After sex with a law-abiding stranger, he confesses all and she turns him in. Colette then returns to spirit him off to Europe. In Paris, still a teenager, he becomes king of the pickpockets until he falls afoul of a brutal Czech racketeer who knows his Henry James. He survives an attempt on his life before marrying Colette, in Spain. They return stateside and join Jerry in a final make-us-rich-for-life scam. The key is Kevin’s knowledge of the checksum algorithm (but of course). But the heist goes disastrously wrong, meanwhile providing the only real tension in the story.

There’s energy here, but the colorful details don’t count for much in the absence of a fully coherent storyline.