The Smack

The Smack is a love story; but not entirely, although a good one on it's own. It is also a tale about grifters that spend their lives hatching schemes to bilk the unsuspecting out of their money. Mr Lange sets up scenarios describing some of the ways that schemers have perfected to scam money out of people looking for the deal that is too good to be true - but is suddenly there. These involve commodities including gold, stocks, bonds, vacation sites and many other "I got it cheaper than you" products.
Rowan Petty is a man that we meet while he is selling shares in a fake mining operation in South America. He is called by a contact of his broaching a scheme to pick up two million dollars. The money is held by someone holding it for a relative of his that obtained in while in the army and bilking the funds via illegal sales deals. Petty is offered a large share of the money if he could get his hands on the sum which is currently in the United States.
While planning the job Rowan meets a prostitute and when inviting her to his hotel room finds that he is beginning to have romantic feelings for her. The girl helps him out with the scheme to theAA satisfaction of both. An interesting story, well told and certainly providing the reader with a portrait of another side of life different than the one currently living. Certainly well done.

THE SMACK
Richard Lange
Mulholland Books/Little Brown
978-0-316-32762-6
Hardcover
Thriller

I will confess that in spite of myself I had to stop reading THE SMACK for just a few minutes. This wonderfully written caper novel, so dark and in some parts so god awfully depressing, was almost too much for me at first. Author Richard Lange sucks you in and won’t let you out at a minimum baseline, but THE SMACK makes you a part of the proceedings, taking you to places where you will never want to go and making you grateful that you’re not there.

We meet Rowan Petty right off the starting block in THE SMACK and the show is but for a few vignettes pretty much all his right through to the finish. Petty is messed up. He’s not an addict, though he does drink a bit. He is instead an example of someone stuck in his own bad juices. We meet him as he is stuck in Reno, Nevada, the self-styled “biggest little city in the world,” but he’s not there for the skiing or even for the gambling. Instead, on a lonely Thanksgiving weekend Petty is stuck with a broken door car in a dead-end motel, attempting to do the only thing he is halfway good at, which is running phone scams. Petty has pretty much run out of asphalt on that particular road, however, when he is seemingly thrown a lifeline by a former associate of his father’s, someone who was also in the game and who has a line on what appears to be a major score. It seems that a couple of servicemen in Afghanistan are ripping off their Uncle and shipping the proceeds back to the states and which are being hidden away in Los Angeles, awaiting the day when the gents return back to the world. All Petty has to do is go to Los Angeles, locate the stash, and liberate it. It’s easier said than done, but Petty is desperate, and with his car fixed and a newly acquired traveling companion --- a prostitute whom Petty has befriended, or maybe it’s the other way around --- Petty heads to Los Angeles in a do or die effort to liberate the money. He gets close at first, but never really strikes paydirt, and is on the verge of giving up when circumstances overtake him, as it were. Suddenly, Petty has no choice. He needs a lot of money, and quickly --- it’s literally a life or death situation --- and throws every dirty trick in his skillset into getting it. Petty knows that he is dealing with some very dangerous people, but he doesn’t know how dangerous and how close they really are. One gets the feeling almost from the beginning of THE SMACK that it is not going to end well, and it doesn’t. At least not entirely.

One thing is clear from the beginning of THE SMACK: Petty is not a good guy. Let’s state it positively instead. He is a bad guy who has his occasional moments in spite of himself. Lange does not try to make Petty a sympathetic character; you will cheer him on, however, for his motivations, even when you probably shouldn’t. I can count on one hand contemporary authors who can do this as well as Lange: Wallace Stroby, Jason Starr, the late Elmore Leonard, Donald Winslow, and Peter Leonard. That’s it. Lange also gets into the grit and dirt that rises out of riding out bad luck and terrible decisions which have repercussions for months, years, and decades. It’s all here in THE SMACK, which is worth buying and reading just for its descriptions of crap motel rooms. And so much more. Strongly recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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