In The Buffalo Job, the fifth effort by Mike Knowles in his Wilson series, Knowles shows he’s not growing soft, or even slightly sympathetic to Wilson, the former mob enforcer who just can’t quite get his life back together. Exhaustion, pain, mayhem and death travel with Wilson. Corpses and battered people litter the way behind him.

Wilson has a weak moment and finishes a job stealing a work of art for some young gangsters after they failed at the same job that he’d planned for them. One was a nephew to an Albanian mob boss, Pyrros Vogli. Vogli decides Wilson is hungry for work and “insists” that he manage a job for him stealing one of the rarest articles in the world, a Stradivarius violin that could soon be out of his reach.

Wilson has to assemble a crew in just a few days, babysit the mobster’s nephew as one of the crew, cross the Canadian/US border to Buffalo, and steal the violin either from a vault or a busy concert hall. While he concerns himself with the loyalty of his thrown-together crew, he also has to worry that the Albanian mob in Buffalo may find out he’s on their turf, or worse maybe trying to steal the violin too. What could go wrong?

Knowles propels his story forward with multi-dimensional characters, terse dialog, spare descriptions and unflinching violence. Scenes crackle with authenticity, as tense moments explode into ferocious action. Wilson is a protagonist who will make you cringe, even as you root for him to succeed.

Knowles has put a Canadian pin on the hardboiled crime fiction map. His dialog is reminiscent of Andrew Vachss, his brutality of Ken Bruen, and his plotting of Charlie Huston. Those are three pretty good reasons to read him if you like your crime fiction dark.
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I just read a clunker. The fifth installment in the Wilson series, an import from Canada. Wilson is a master thief. He's recruited by a bumbling, neophyte gangster, Ilir who tried to steal a painting and failed. Wilson, within days, steals the painting by creating a 'scavenger hunt' in the museum, causing overcrowding, masking the theft.

Ilir's uncle, Vogli, is the Torontonian head of the Albanian mob. Hearing of Wilson's swift success, he coerces Wilson to stead a Stradivarius from a Buffalo concert hall. The only catch: as part of the $800,000 deal, half up front, he must include Ilir on the team as Vogli's eyes and ears. They travel to Buffalo, plan the heist only to find that the Buffalo family of the Albanian mob also wants to steal the violin.

Of course, things go wrong all over the place.

In a 2009 interview, Mike Knowles, the author said "I have always been into pulp books and seventies crime fiction. Back then, there were a lot more books revolving around criminals and how they managed to survive living outside the law... What there weren’t enough of were the mean, pulpy, hard-boiled crime novels I read as a kid. I set out to write the kind of book it was getting harder to find. Wilson evolved out of the idea of a contemporary ronin. A lone man with no allegiances and many enemies. I always loved books where one man takes on all comers and manages to survive." This book is not hard boiled. It's not pulp. It's not gritty.

It's a poorly written, mundane book whose characters readers will not bond with, care about, etc. My suggestion? Steer clear of this book. ( )