It’s a Mystery: “The most successful criminals don’t look the part”

Ghostman

By Roger HobbsKnopf, 2013To begin with, the author of this superb first novel, Ghostman, is a fraud. He claims to be a twenty-something recent college graduate. This is impossible given the insider’s knowledge that he displays about bank robbing, safecracking, the Federal payload, weapons, and how to run a high-level heist and remain untouchable as one of the best con artists in the world. I believe that Hobbs, like his protagonist/anti-hero, is a world-class thief in his mid-thirties, with impeccable non-credentials and no known address.Since part of the charm is that I can’t prove any of this, let’s get right into the book. The Ghostman, whose highly articulate narrator is called Jack (but that’s not his real name), is a loner living far off the grid. He bills himself as “an armed robber” (not a thief) specializing in disappearing: “I’ve helped maybe a hundred bank robbers escape over the years.” He’s a professional imposter who rivals Sherlock Holmes as a master of disguise: “I’ve changed so many times that even I forget what I look like.”In his downtime he reads and translates the classics, yes, as in ancient texts. His personal motto comes from The Aeneid: “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,” which he translates as “if you can’t reach heaven, raise hell.” No one knows who he is or where to find him. Until he receives an email from the one man who can penetrate his deep cover and whom he can’t refuse: Marcus. (Marcus is Moriarty incarnate, Holmes’s arch enemy whose brilliant organizational powers permit him to do little himself other than plan.)Jack owes Marcus big time; his one and only screw up five years ago during a big bank heist in Kuala Lumpur cost Marcus his reputation as an international mastermind.

Back then, Marcus was the man to work for. He wasn’t a cartel kingpin yet. He was a full-time jugmarker. He wrote heists the way Mozart wrote music. They were big and beautiful and made money like you wouldn’t believe. Five years ago, everybody wanted a shot at one of his jobs, because everything he touched turned to gold.

Now Marcus is a mere drug lord and Jack is to blame. But Marcus doesn’t want to ice the Ghostman, at least not yet. What Marcus wants is for Jack to make everything about a badly bungled armored-car robbery in Atlantic City that he engineered disappear. Everything except the money—$1.2 million in freshly minted bills. That’s in the hands of the one robber who survived, and who’s gravely wounded and missing. Of course, there’s an even bigger catch: there is a security mechanism in the money, involving a GPS device and an exploding dye pack, that’s set to go off in 48 hours. (I cannot resist pointing out that the elaborately detailed backstory on those exploding bills is but another example that this guy Hobbs can’t possibly be who he claims to be in the bio.)Not only does Jack have to find the cash fast but he’s got to outwit Marcus’s rival, who is even more ruthless than Marcus.

He was born with the name Harrihar Turner, but nobody ever called him that. He had another name, one that only a few drug dealers dared to say aloud. A name that once heard, nobody ever forgot.The Wolf.

Jack has never had the dubious pleasure of meeting the gent until now. Suddenly, TheWolf hauls him in unceremoniously and by way of introduction boasts about killing a little girl with drain cleaner dissolved in milk .The Wolf’s message is simple: “If you don’t bring me the money from this morning’s heist, I’ll have you killed.”Coupled with other horror stories Jack has heard about this guy, the Wolf’s messagegets through – almost. After all, Jack is extremely resourceful when it comes to getting out ofperilous jams. As he says:

“I’ve never been caught, questioned or fingerprinted. I’m very goodat what I do.”

As the clock ticks down, Hobbs inserts volatile flashbacks to that job that went sour inKuala Lumpur where Ghostman betrayed Marcus and hooked up one last time with Angela, hismentor:

She was the kind of woman who could talk her way out of anything…. She was an actress…pure Method. She didn’t act, she changed who she was. …As good as I am, I could never hold a candle to Angela. She taught me everything I knew…. She showed me how by being nobody, I could be anyone I wanted…she taught me how to cut the last ties to the normal world and live like a ghost…. To say she was beautiful would be to miss the point. She was anything you wanted her to be…she wore diamond earrings no woman had worn in two hundred years, because she had stolen them from a museum.

Hobbs juxtaposes the two tales superbly. There is murder, mayhem and multiple levels of double- and triple-crosses. Hobbs manages to build up the suspense while keeping his hole cards close to his vest. There is also a delicious hide-and-seek subplot involving Jack and a pretty FBI agent whose interest in the crime may not be all it’s cracked up to be. It all gets sorted out with plenty of panache and by the end you expect the unexpected.This is one classy, entertaining noir thriller written with great style and flair. It’s as sharp as it is original. I don’t care what the author has really done or where he is hiding out as long as he comes back with another one.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.