THE SUITCASE

A California woman and her brother get tangled in different but equally deadly situations in Van Vleet’s thriller.

Thirty-year-old unemployed Robert Donegan signs on to drive a 13-ton moving van from LA to Chicago because he needs the money. After his sketchy co-driver is shot to death at a rest stop, Robert manages to elude the killers, running the van over one of them. When he’s able to pull off the road and check the contents of the van, he discovers drugs and bundles of cash totaling just under 2 million dollars that members of a Mexican cartel are looking for. Robert pockets a few bundles of the cash, and he keeps the rest in a suitcase. Boarding a Greyhound back to his sister Tyne Williams’ house in Hollywood, he puts the suitcase in the bus’s baggage compartment. Big mistake: A sudden swerve of the bus results in the suitcase tumbling out alongside the road, where it’s found by a man moving his family to North Hollywood. What neither Robert nor the family man realize is that tracking devices packed inside the bundles enable the cartel to identify their locations (“Oh, my God… that means they already know where we live,” Tyne exclaims upon their discovery). Tyne has her own issues—her adulterous husband, John, has been murdered. If this sounds like a soap opera, perhaps it’s because the author starred in several, most notably All My Children for more than a dozen years. An editor is badly needed: There are typos and frequent run-on sentences. The violence may be off-putting for some readers, and the author’s habit of repeatedly stating the ages of characters becomes comical (aside from a few cartel members, no one is over 40, and all the women are slim and attractive). Still, there’s compelling action, frequent twists, some enjoyable banter, and multiple plotlines. In fact, there’s enough going on for two or more books.

An overstuffed but diverting crime caper featuring the young and the restless.