Crooks

by Lou Berney ★★★★☆

Crooks introduces us to the Mercurio family: patriarch Buddy, matriarch Lillian, and eventually their five children. Buddy and Lillian live on the fringes of honest society—what initially attracted Buddy to his eventual wife was him witnessing her pick the pocket of a customer at the Vegas boutique in which she was working. They're not over-the-top criminals, but they always have some sort of grift in the works.

When they start having children, the apples don't fall far from the tree, and their kids each inherit different components of their grifter parents. Ray is the unquestioning muscle; Jeremy, the charmer; Alice, the mastermind; Tallulah, the daredevil; and Paul/Piggy, the youngest child, late to the game and always on the outside looking in.

I was expecting a sweeping generational crime novel, and maybe you could describe Crooks that way...but it turned out to be much more of a loosely interconnected short story collection than a cohesive novel. After we're introduced to the Mercurios, we follow them on their escape from Vegas and mob ties to a life in Oklahoma City. From that point, it's a series of vignettes: Buddy's attempt to open a disco club in OKC in the 1970s; Jeremy's venture to L.A. to ostensibly become an actor but who eventually defaults to an easier (and less legal) path to cash; Tallulah's time as—in a bizarre departure from the narrative through line—an acrobat in Russia; Ray's attempt to go straight in Vegas; and Alice's eventual bending of her morals in order to prevail in a sticky situation. The vignettes focus almost entirely on each individual Mercurio, with an occasional cameo from a sibling, but the individual stories possess almost no connective tissue. There's almost nothing linking the stories beyond the same last name possessed by each character.

That being said, the components that have made me a fan of Berney's work in the past are still there. The writing and storytelling is solid, and the characters are well-developed and memorable. I just came into the book expecting one thing and getting another. I am distinctly not a fan of short story collections, and so if there's one major takeaway, it's that: treat this as a collection of five well-written short stories, and if that's your thing, it may be something you'd enjoy. As someone who was expecting "A Sweeping Crime Thriller Saga of Four Mafia Siblings Navigating Secrets, Betrayal, and the Dark Side of Family Bonds," as it was advertised, I was left wanting it to be something it was not.

No matter where you fall on the short story love/hate spectrum, there are better Lou Berney books out there. Specifically, I'd recommend Berney's The Long and Faraway Gone or November Road over this one—both are interesting, satisfying stand-alone thriller complete novels that made my "Best of 2018" list way back in the day.