ABSOLUTE PERFECTION OF CRIME

They call themselves a crime family, but that’s hyperbole: They’re nickel-and-dimers, and they know it. Marin, however, having just stepped up to head-of-the-crime-family status and feeling his oats, decides to make a statement. He argues that they can make the family bones if they knock over the big-time casino so prominent in their small French seacoast town. The “absolute perfection of crime” is what he glowingly describes to his five less sanguine compatriots. Marin is persuasive, and while Pierre, who narrates the story, thinks they’re all way out of their league, he subdues them, allowing himself to be dazzled by the prospect of millions and, as always, by the force of Marin’s personality. The imaginative, audacious caper is carefully planned, goes off without a hitch, and fails only because of a last-minute betrayal. As a result, there’s a bloody shootout with the police, and Andrei, a family-member, goes down. Lucho, the betrayer, and Marin, the putative godfather, disappear—the latter with a good part of the loot. Pierre is captured, tried, convicted, and ushered into the slammer. Seven years later, Pierre, having done his time, is again a free man. By now, he’s learned who the betrayer is. He also knows where Marin and the money are. The hunt is on.

Viel’s first is competent but oh-so-noirishly familiar. And asking the cover price for 130 pages of such thin gruel might just be the absolute perfection of chutzpah.