This type of book should have is own genre. People love books with dirty money and dirty families but that just isn't for me. I can't relate to the characters or have empathy for them

This was gritty and surprisingly smart with some thought provoking moments that moved me. Light on the thrills it did have a solid mystery at least.

Shecky lives in Brooklyn with his niece Kerasha and nephew Henry, laundering money in addition to his day job as an artist. Kerasha is a famous child-thief, and Henry is the muscle of the operation. Shecky loves his family, and will sacrifice anything for them - until he goes missing with a large amount of cash. This book is complex and threefold: the story is part crime drama, part family drama, and part mystery. It's heartfelt yet realistic, and will keep you guessing. It's different than what I typically read, but I'm so glad I got the chance!

This was a DNF for me -- nothing against this book I think it's just personal preference.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishing company for approving me for this, I regret that it was not aligned with my usual taste in reads.

A fast moving, deeply plotted compulsive read. Set in Brooklyn and rich with neighbourhood allusions, you can tell that Brain Selfon has experience in the underside of the law.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on October 6, 2020

Crime novels that focus on criminals are almost always more interesting than crime novels that focus on cops. Where unimaginative crime fiction portrays cops as righteous protectors of the helpless who are preyed upon by evil villains, writers who create empathy for criminals understand that good and evil lurk in every heart. The path one follows is often dictated by circumstance as much as choice.

Shecky Keenan, Keresha Brown (Shecky's niece), and Henry Vek (the son of Shecky's cousin) have made themselves into a family. Shecky operates a money laundering business. Henry supervises the runners, the people who pick up illicit cash and send it to foreign accounts through various money transfer services. Keresha is a 23-year-old former addict who helps Shecky and Henry with her sharp eyes and a talent for burglary.

Shecky is getting older. Nothing matters to him as much as Henry and Keresha. He knows they won’t stay in his house forever. He “fears a silent house above all else.” Yet he’ll cross any line to protect them, even if he might lose their affection by crossing lines against their will.

Shecky probably identifies with Keresha because his parents were less than nurturing. Keresha’s mother cared more about heroin than she cared about her daughter. Keresha is on probation and obsessed with her court-ordered therapist, who isn’t pleased when she breaks into his home at night to share her problems. Keresha struggles with bad lifestyle choices because that’s what people do, but the fact that she continues to struggle sends a message of hope.

Henry enjoys making art and admires the murals and other work of a young man he befriends named Emil Scott. Against Shecky’s advice, Henry takes on Emil as a runner. Emil seems to be unusually honest and reliable until the day Henry assigns him to pick up a large bag of cash. Both Emil and the cash disappear. Henry worries that he misplaced his trust while Shecky worries that the owner of the cash, an unsavory customer named Vasya, will make his displeasure known with violence.

Shecky’s problems are compounded by his fear that the police are closing in. “Suspicious transaction” notices are leading to closed accounts. A police surveillance camera seems to be focused on his house. Bad things are likely to happen. The questions that loom are why they are happening and whether anything bad will happen to characters the reader cares about.

The other two key characters are Zera and Lipz. Zera is part of the Human Trafficking Task Force, a woman from Montenegro who “was born of evil and had known evil all her life.” The goals she wants to accomplish are not within the ambit of conventional police work. Lipz is Henry’s long-time friend. She’s a heroin dealer who helps Henry and Shecky find new customers but engages in dangerous behavior in her quest for a share of the profits.

The plot is smart and focused. Brian Selfon delivers graceful prose that is stripped of redundancy and unnecessary explanations. The story is sufficiently complex that it keeps the reader guessing but not so convoluted that the reader will become lost.

While the story is entertaining, Selfon’s characters form the heart of the novel. Central characters evolve as the story progresses. Some of them are casting aside the defenses they created to respond to adversity and are opening themselves to a feeling of self-worth. At the very least, they may come to appreciate the importance of friendship and family. Being there for another person will always help you feel better about yourself, will make you feel less alone in an alienating world. These are the kind of sympathetic characters who make me extoll the virtues of crime fiction that focuses on criminals.

RECOMMENDED

Love this book. The crew is interesting and complicated.
Shecky is such a man in need of love. But disconnected from the lives and pain behind all that money

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for an advanced copy of this novel.


The Nightworkers is a thriller following a family of money launderers throw into chaos when one of their runners goes missing. Shecky lives in old Brooklyn with his niece Kerasha and nephew Henry, who are making their way through the ranks of the family business.

What I like about this is the characters. They are all fully developed and different. They all have scenes with outside characters away form the family dynamic, and all have a life outside of the hustle.

This is a strong debut.

I really like the use of the future perfect tense in this, it's only used a few times, but it gives closure to characters or their stories, and I think it's really clever.

Shecky Keenan lives from terror to terror. He heads a family of three, glued-together misfits. Their game: money laundering in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York. Why move money for an unsavory clientele? In Shecky's words, "Profit from the two heavies tomorrow means a mortgage payment for the family". Shecky is worried..."a shadow haunts his home".

Uncle Shecky was used to the dark side of life, an unnurtured existence with no one to look after him. He was determined to love and look out for Henry Vek , his nephew and Kerasha Brown, his niece. This included home cooked family dinners. Shecky, however, had his agenda, ongoing plans to immerse Henry and Kerasha into the money laundering fold.

Henry Vek, now 23 years old, had been living with Shecky and learning his trade since age 10. Henry, a brawler at school has..."grown into his anger". "Henry has artistic aspirations, the opposite of good business sense...responsible...willing to start fights...". Kerasha Brown, 21 years old, is "fresh out of the cage" having been jailed for six years. "Kerasha is famous in Bushwick's underworld...no room she can't get out of, no person she can't get past...".

Emil Scott, a budding artist, attends an art opening and meets Henry. Henry is taken with Emil. Emil has "yellow on his hands...purple on his pants-this is a worker". "If Emil is maybe 90 percent artist and 10 percent criminal, Henry is the same, only with the proportions reversed". Henry teaches Emil the ins and outs of being a runner. "It's simple. You pick up, you drop off, and I'll pay you...I will keep you in the dark...Ignorance is deniability". Emil is ready for his first big pick-up. Uncle Shecky is distressed. "A runner must be dependable, but they should also be expendable...forget likeable...what you want is useable". Henry's disregard of Shecky's warning will have ramifications. Where is Emil and the $250,000 in dirty money he was carrying" "Did something bad happen to Emil...or did something bad happen because of him?"

"The Nightworkers" by Brian Selfon is a Brooklyn Noir crime novel written from the point of view of a criminal, money laundering family. Uncle Shecky, Henry, and Kerasha each carry the scars of turbulent, violent upbringings. They have personal demons wrecking havoc on their lives. Kerasha knows "the power of the urge...you can't fight it. You're the vehicle, and something wicked does the steering". Will the urge define each one of them? Author Selfon, having worked as an investigative analyst for New York law enforcement, has written a multi-layered analysis of criminals in crisis and a compelling snapshot of a small time money laundering business. An excellent debut novel.

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD, and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I don't know where to really start with this book. I really liked it at first! It was gritty, dark, and mysterious. But then it kept taking, in my opinion, unnecessary turns. I hated the Kerasha story line. I didn't see how that connected at all. Then, in the end, they barely resolved the main mystery (someone dies) and it just ends. I wanted to like this ARC but now that I'm done I think what I liked most about it was the cover art. Such a bummer as I'd never really read anything in the money laundering world and thought it could be a fresh take on the normal "wife gets murdered/goes missing" mystery I usually gravitate towards.

A different take on a crime novel, The Nightworkers by Brian Selfon, takes you into the interpersonal lives of a family of money launderers after the murder of one of their "employees". The book is part mystery, part family drama, and part crime novel. Shifting perspectives between the 3 members of the family, you learn what is going on within each person's head and see the situation through different eyes. I don't know what I had originally expected with this story, but the end result was great! A quick read for anyone who is a fan of a crime mystery fan.

THE NIGHTWORKERS
Brian Selfon
MCD Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 978-0-22201-7
Hardcover
Crime/Thriller

My opinions and impressions of THE NIGHTWORKERS were all over the place for a great deal of the book. The narrative of debut author Brian Selfon was all over the place in terms of time and place. Some of it was presented during the course of prefiguring, some of it to provide background, and, on an occasional basis, seemingly to do it just to do it. There were characters --- almost all of them, actually --- who were fascinating and wholly realized within a paragraph or two, but who disappeared all too quickly. So for all of that, I was deeply disappointed when I finished. Taken in parts, THE NIGHTWORKERS may have its occasional weaknesses, but as a whole it is one of the best novels of the year thus far.

THE NIGHTWORKERS at its center is about a family of criminals. This isn’t one of your grand concept Corleone story, however. The family in THE NIGHTWORKERS quietly moves great sums of money from criminal enterprises to offshore banks and back again. The head of the three-person unit is one Shecky Keenan, who prepares large family breakfasts for his Henry, his nephew, and Kerasha, his niece. The familial ties are beginning to stretch as THE NIGHTWORKERS begins. Henry, in his early twenties, is an integral part of Shecky’s business, managing the physical transfer of large amounts of cash to places where it can be quietly offloaded. Henry is an aspiring artist who is attracted to Emil, a rising star on the New York art scene. Emil, whose income has not quite caught up to his reputation, keeps body and soul together by doing a bit of dealing on the side. Henry recruits him as a runner. Two things happen. One is that the intricate system which Shecky has quietly and patiently created begins to collapse. The other is that Emil, who has never shorted one dollar from a delivery, suddenly disappears after picking up a deposit. Whether the two incidents are connected or not is an unresolved element for a good bit of THE NIGHTWORKERS. Henry has also acquired an extremely dangerous girlfriend who is a treacherous combination of sweet and sour and who is slowly bending him to her own purposes. Kerasha for her part is a more complicated soul. She is a recovering heroin addict who at the beginning of the book has been conditionally released from prison. Her major talent is an almost preternatural ability to burglarize, a talent which ultimately resulted in her incarceration. Part of the condition for her continued release is her participation in counseling sessions Andrew Xu, a somewhat offputting psychiatrist who holds her continued freedom in her hands. Kerasha’s problems are aggravated by her compulsions --- addicting and stealing --- even as she exhibits a wide and deep appreciation for classic literature in her spare time. Shecky is faced with trying to keep his business and his family together, often finding that when he does something to reach one of those goals it moves the other further away. There are surprises to be found on the paths which he takes. Not all of them are good ones.

I underlined a number of passages in THE NIGHTWORKERS. Even as I struggled occasionally with Selfon’s pacing and plotting his turns of phrase were remarkable from beginning to end. The ending by the way is stunning. I need to read THE NIGHTWORKERS again in its entirety to examine how Selfon got everyone to where he did. I hope that his future novels will return to the streets and the characters, major and minor, which he has introduced here. Recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2020, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

Emil is a talented up-and-coming Brooklyn artist but perennially broke. So when he meets Henry, another wannabe artist, and is offered a gig being a runner for money laundering, he decides that’s an easier way of making cash instead of slinging baggies of dope - until he suddenly disappears along with a quarter million in cash. Henry and his small crime family have to figure out what happened and where the cash has gone before the money’s owners come looking for it…

Brian Selfon’s debut novel The Nightworkers is really two and a half stories, only one of which is half-decent. The half-decent story starts well - Emil and Henry’s new friendship, it develops nicely, there’s the twist. The problem is that the start of the book is the peak - everything afterwards is downhill.

The second story is about Kerasha, a troubled young woman on parole with a heroin addiction. We learn about her horrible childhood, junkie mother, and weird, burgeoning obsession with her shrink, Dr Xu - only none of it matters. You could excise Kerry’s entire story and it wouldn’t affect the main narrative of the missing money and the trouble surrounding it. It’s not very interesting to read in itself, it pointlessly distracts and only makes the novel overlong.

The half story is about Officer Montenegro, a victim of human trafficking turned cop/fighter of human trafficking. Like Kerry’s story, Montenegro’s could easily be cut as it hasn’t got any relevance to anything, is grimly dull and pads out the novel still further without adding much besides pages.

I liked the character of Uncle Shecky, who’s a sort of modern-day Fagin with a heart, and Henry was interesting for the most part as he’s something of a livewire with a chip on his shoulder. Then add his upset feelings at Emil and he becomes this unpredictable Tazmanian devil so there was always an element of tension wherever he went. The novel was mostly well-written and there were a number of moments in the main narrative that were genuinely gripping to read.

Selfon’s got a lot of potential as a crime novelist and might write a great novel one day but The Nightworkers isn’t that great novel - it’s too unfocused and messy, lacking anything substantial to sink your teeth into to be satisfying. If he had cut Kerry and Montenegro’s stuff and stuck with and dug deeper into Henry/Emil/Shecky’s narrative, this would be a strong novella, but, as it is, it’s too long by half and made dreary and boring for it. A weak debut.

A surprisingly touching account of a small family of fixers, each with their own demons and dreams of belonging.

This is a layered story of a small, pieced-together crime family that works as fixers for all dangerous sorts: Uncle Shecky, an aging man and head of the family, yearning for their way of life to stay in tact and hearing the wisdom of the sister he lost at a young age, Henry, his nephew recovering from a past of anger and a broken family with dreams of being an artist, and Kerasha, his niece known for her impeccable acts of break ins and theft who is battling her own demons of a junkie heritage and time in prison. The book covers so many timeframes, but centers around a summer of murders that begin with that of one of their runners, and Henry's friend, Emil. As we trudge through this family's tumultuous time on the brink of falling apart, multiple histories and betrayals are revealed, and as a reader you never quite know who to root for.

I haven't read too many organized crime novels myself, so I was extremely surprised by this one! The characters are complicated and there is so much depth given to their backstories and the demons that they are all separately facing. Each has their own shade of a dark past and yet they also each have such hope and softness.

The pace and timing may be tricky for some. It moves extremely quickly back and forth between past and present but after getting my bearings, I found that I enjoyed it - it was a pace very reflective of the harried and dangerous lives playing out on the page.

What a fabulous novel. Shecky is a hardworking man who has taught his nephew everything about the business and makes a point of bringing the family - Shecky, Henry, and niece Kerasha - together for meals. He has his standards. He also has a job laundering money, and spends his days keeping track of money that comes from a variety of sources, sending it through a complex web of shell companies and offshore accounts, until it comes out clean. Henry collects the cash, using a group of runners to fan out across New York and gather cash from small Brooklyn businesses that want to evade the tax man and some larger businesses that want a front of legitimacy. Henry is also an untrained artist, and when he meets Emil, a talented artist, their interests seem to align. Emil has been slinging dope to make ends meet. He can move up in the world by working for Henry - and can teach Henry about art. Their friendship is deep.

So is the love Shecky feels for his nephew and for Kerasha, a genius thief who was defeated, just once, by a complicated Russian combination lock, enough to spend six years incarcerated before being paroled and taken in by her uncle. She's not thrilled that she has to see a psychiatrist regularly as part of her release, but since his recommendation will determine whether she goes back inside or goes free, she has to do it, assisted by lines of poetry or other fragments of the books she devours to fill the gaps left after her mother died of an overdose. (The books are all stolen
It's all going well, until Emil is murdered, someone is watching their house, and some of the elaborate banking arrangements Shecky has carefully made start shutting down. Transfer denied. Account closed. Internal inquiry. Each of them has to confront the reality of the violence all that money represents - and the danger they are in.

This is not a thriller (though I found it thrilling). It's a rich set of characters, beautifully developed, complex and arresting, including occasional glimpses of Zera Montenegro, a police officer who is desperately trying to build a case against a Russian whose money, laundered by Shecky, comes from trafficking women - something she knows from her own experience, But the indifference of the NYPD toward the victims she cares about weighs her down.

The story uses Emil's murder as a linchpin, with the characters' stories, before and after, connected through it with narrative skill. Even better is the writing - evocative and sharp. There's a wonderful tension build up around the moral dilemma Shecky faces as he has to confront the crimes his skillful financial sleights of hand enables.

I read this book within 24 hours. It cost me sleep, but was worth it. I won't forget these characters, and I will keep puzzling over the irony that, in between chapters, I read an investigative journalism piece, part of the FinCEN Files, about how big banks profit from massive amounts of global money laundering, documenting transfers of funds by terrorists and drug cartels but doing next to nothing to stop the flow.

This character driven novel chronicles the stories of a cast of misfits who came together in a cobbled version of a family, as their connection begins to fray at the seams.
You have a small-time money launderer, one of his couriers who has aspirations of being an artist, and a talented thief with a voracious appetite for reading, to name a few. And all of them have secrets that they keep from each other and at times, themselves.
That the story flows around a criminal transaction that takes a wrong turn is almost beside the point, it’s the characters backstories that will keep the reader glued to the page.
It does the author a disservice not to categorize this novel as noir fiction rather than the thriller label it bears. You have cracked moral compasses, gloomy ambience, a grim cityscape, thorny relationships and the plague of disillusionment, all delivered with enviable talent. The authors evocative descriptive powers result in a distinct voice worthy of readership.

This one was a DNF for me. I tried to get into it, and I just found it a little boring. I'd still be interested in other works by the author, but this wasn't the book for me.

Somewhere out in writing land William Boyle and JP Gritton got together and created and frenzied scrambled egg crime novel. Chaotic suspense novel unputdownable. A very original crime, heist novel told from many vantage points of view rapped tightly up into a great little ending. Highly recommend.

Nightworkers was just not my preferred style of writing. The slang, the names of the characters, the present tense style, Therefore, I prefer not to give a review.

The Nightworkers is an excellent debut! I'm not completely into crime novels but if done well, I think they are interesting and this is a prime example. A family of money launderers? I've never read anything about that before! I do wish there were more details on the laundering and as it goes on, it does lose it's steam at one point but regardless of that, it is still an enjoyable novel. I would definitely read Selfon's next novel. Thank you to the publisher and to netgalley for the arc!