MAD MONEY

Hard Case Crime completes its cycle of Collins’ novels about not-quite-reformed thief Nolan with his first appearance and one of his last.

In Spree, the later, longer, and more polished of the pair, Nolan’s live-in lover, Sherry, is kidnapped to pressure him into masterminding a grandly scaled robbery of the most tempting targets among the 50 stores in Missouri’s Brady Eighty mall. Coleman Comfort, the paterfamilias behind the scheme, already has a grudge against Nolan for killing his brother Sam and Sam’s two sons in an earlier plot that went violently off the rails, and it seems obvious that as soon as the heist is history, he plans to kill Sherry and Nolan anyway. In fact, his homicidal plans are even more extensive than that, though not if Nolan and his frequent accomplice Jon Ross have anything to say about it. Mourn the Living, the first story Collins wrote about Nolan, though not the first he published, is an informal homage to Richard Stark’s adventures of one-named criminal Parker. Owing a big favor to mobbed-up pencil pusher Sid Tisor, Nolan reluctantly agrees to look into the death of Tisor’s daughter, Irene, a Chelsey University student who fell 10 stories to her death, even though it’s going to bring him uncomfortably close to Chicago’s Franco crime family, who’ve already put a $250,000 bounty on his head for his past misdeeds against them. Was Irene high on LSD? Was she actually pushed? What details have been covered up by Chelsey cop Phil Saunders, who’s the cousin of incompetent gang boss George Franco’s financial secretary Irwin Elliot, the real power behind Chelsey’s thriving drug industry?

Hard-case crimes with the bonus of a few surprising zingers.