Modern, noirish heist-gone-wrong mystery. Had some good moments, but felt rather over long. Seemed to be convoluted for convolution's sake; surprising for the sake of surprise. A few too many twists out of nowhere, motivations seemed to serve the plot rather than the characters... In the end it just didn't hang together very well. On the positive side, it was a quick read. ( )

First-rate crime novel, told from multiple viewpoints, about the aftermath of a crime gone wrong. ( )

Grim, fast, violent and bloody. This book was an amazing crime thriller. ( )

Well. That was quite something. I know skin-of-the-teeth escapes are standard for main characters, but here it's a mad scramble from one close call to the next. It surely doesn't get monotonous, but one does start to run out of breath following along as the characters essentially stagger from one pummeling to the next, and, now that I think of it, 'skin-of-the-teeth' is a fitting phrase to use, considering both modern usage and the original sense as Job meant it...guess this book has both, doesn't it? Sigh... Dammit, Lennon, you couldn't pull just ONE more miraculous escape outta your arse? Ah, who'm I kidding, everyone he knew was dead, even the ones who betrayed him, he's been crashed into, bludgeoned, dropped down a pipe, shot, pistol-whipped, singed, bludgeoned, drugged, burned with acid, probably shot again, flash-grenaded, and dumped down the same pipe by his would-be brother-in-law....hell, time for a nap. But still. At the end of the book I just spent a while pouting like a little kid, all, 'Awww, no fair!' ( )

Man, this took me a while to finish. It certainly had nothing to do with the plot, the characters or the author’s pacing; I just picked the wrong times to read. Almost every time I picked this book up, I dozed off. What had made this experience so frustrating was that I really liked it and I would find myself getting angry and wondering if I was suffering from narcolepsy. Trust me, if you’re unable to find a story about a mute, Irish getaway driver at least a little interesting, there may be something chemically wrong with you. I blame the removal of daylight savings time last weekend.

Books like The Wheelman are the reason I’m leaning towards literature as my main source of action-fiction. Hey, I love watching big explosions and car chases in movies and television just as much as the next guy but it takes real writing chops to be able to write an action thriller so clearly that it throws away the need for a visual medium; and boy does he have some chops.

I found a lot of parallels between this and one of my favorite books I had read last year, [b:Kiss Me, Judas|185748|Kiss Me, Judas|Will Christopher Baer|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172527722s/185748.jpg|1048369]. Not in the sense that we’re looking a novel here that mirrors the neo noir genre like [b:Kiss Me, Judas|185748|Kiss Me, Judas|Will Christopher Baer|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172527722s/185748.jpg|1048369] but a lot of the characters and Swierczynski’s prose seemed pretty similar to [a:Will Christopher Baer|41586|Will Christopher Baer|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-M-50x66.jpg]. Both novels share fast paced and often frenetic action, with action scenes happening within pages of each other. Swierczynski’s prose can be quick and the dialogue is often pretty sharp, so I found myself flying through large chunks of the book in each sitting.

Like Dan wrote in the comments section of this review, I also “have some serious love” for this novel and I have a lot of high hopes for Duane Swierczynski. I’ve read a few reviews of his other novels and have officially placed them on my radar. The man shows definite promise, and with the introduction of a signature character in his catalog and the beginnings of a series, I’m pretty excited to dig into it. ( )