Modern day crime story. The killer(s) are not revealed until the end. There may have been clues in the story, but I really think the puzzle was unsolvable until the end.

Los Angles Burgular is hired to solve a break in of another criminal safe and is soon searching for the killer of his friend and mentor. He is chasing down a list of names, all in a chain to a hit, but people are disappearing sometimes permanently. ( )

My blog post about this book is at this link. ( )

Junior Bender is a burglar. That’s a fact. What keeps it from being a hard, cold fact is Bender’s heart. Bender has a set of codes by which he lives and a set of rules given him by his mentor, Herbie, by which he works. One of those rules “was to delay as long as possible the moment the mark realizes his stuff has been boosted.” That means not taking everything, nor making a mess. Another rule is not to take anything the mark can’t live without.

When Bender finds himself holding a matching set of brooches that prove to be irreplaceable, their pricelessness makes him less pleased than uneasy. And Herbie his mentor is dead--not just dead, but tortured. Bender wants to know why, and who was responsible.

Los Angeles is central to the action in this series, and Hallinan goes right for the nub of a characterization, be it cities or people. When entering a house, for instance, he might toss off a comment about the front lawn looking recently replaced:

“Judging from the eye-ringing emerald hue of the lawn, the grass had never endured a dry minute since it was planted, about forty-five minutes ago. There are two schools of thought associated with good lawns: the British approach, which says you simply plant it and roll it for several centuries, and the Los Angeles nouveau-riche view, which says you just put in a new one whenever the old one gets a little ratty.”

And this:

’I went into the kitchen and filled a very nice Baccarat glass with ice water and carried it into the big living room, with its art deco windows that faced east toward downtown. The window framed only a fragment of the usual view, since the top floors of our relatively small collection of skyscrapers disappeared abruptly into a line of yellow-brown smog as hard and sharp as the stripe on a shirt.”

Hallinan has a real knack for and sensitivity in portraying girls and women as whole beings. In this novel he has two new fourteen-year-old computer savants who already have a productive history of online theft from various state coffers. Bender recruits them to assist him in his search for Herbie’s killer, though he has twinges of conscience about it. One senses his deep compassion…for himself, but also for the girls. When one of them throws her popsicle stick out the window of his moving vehicle, he has to talk himself out of stopping to pick it up. He imagines becoming their mentor, now that his own has passed. It’s actually kind of frightening, though of all the mentors these girls could possibly meet, Junior Bender might be considered the finest still breathing.

Hallinan has an instinctive ability to dots his i’s and cross his t’s (important in mystery and thriller-writing) and still move the action along in character-revealing scenes. His creation of the lovely Ting Ting, a slim-waisted martial arts bisexual that captures the hearts of bruisers and wasters, is not just an aside to the action…I argue it is the action. These characters have their basis in life, though perhaps not in lives we often encounter. Either Hallinan runs into folks like these on a regular basis, or they are all running around his head...pretty wild, even for southern California.

In his Afterword, Hallinan admits that he “had to kill off a few” characters he’d created earlier in the series because they were cluttering up the scenery, such that readers wanted them in every installment. Imagine creating such rich characterizations that we feel peripheral characters are neglected when we don’t see them.

Hallinan has a fluency born of long and deep reading, and constant writing. His other series featuring Poke Rafferty are set in Thailand, which is where I first discovered his unerring eye for what I call “the tell”: uncovering the (sometimes laughable, sometimes painful) characteristic of a place or a person that may define it, and that we recognize in our heart-of-hearts as true. My use of heart-of-hearts is not cliché. Hallinan has more “heart” than any other thriller/mystery writer I know. He and his characters seem to actively practice the Zen Buddhist (?) No Asshole Rule. And characters call each other on transgressions.

Reading Hallinan is just fun and because of that, it reminds me of the Don Winslow mystery series about surfing. I mean, really, can crime be more fun than hanging out with these guys? Junior Bender is such a softie, we don’t like to think of him actually killing people, though he does in this one. He carries a gun after all. It’s not just for show.


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This fourth book in Hallinan's Junior Bender series is much more somber than the others. The trademark laugh-out-loud humor and wisecracks are still there, but they're restrained by the very personal nature of Junior's investigation. Herbie Mott is the man who taught Junior everything he needed to know about the burglary business, and he also taught Junior many important lessons about life. Junior has always looked up to Herbie, so when he goes to find out why Herbie burgled Wattles' safe and finds him dead, his shock and grief are profound.

As he continues to follow clues, he learns more and more about the man Herbie really was, and Junior can't understand how he could have been so blind. For anyone who's read all the Junior Bender books (like I have), the answer is a simple one, and Junior's ex-wife says it best:

"It's because you're decent... it's something people don't think about. The people who have it usually don't even know it... Because decent people assume everyone else is decent. They don't see it as anything special."

The ex-wife hit the nail right on the head. That's the basic part of Junior's charm: he's a decent person and-- even though he's employed on the wrong side of the law-- he expects everyone else to be decent, too. You know he's going to do the right thing even if it isn't easy or convenient simply because it's the right thing to do.

Timothy Hallinan's Junior Bender books are a treat to read. We get to learn some Hollywood and Los Angeles history, we get to see how crooks run their businesses (and how they often intersect with "legitimate" business), we get to laugh a lot, and we get to experience it all through a man most people would never consider to be good because he's a thief. It's a different perspective that I enjoy to pieces, especially knowing that learning about Junior is enough to make some people grind their teeth and think the world's coming to an end. ( )