Description
The Lockpicker by Leonard Chang
ISBN: 978-1936364183
eBook ISBN: 978-1936364190
Price: $16.95
Jake Ahn, burglar and jewel thief, gets involved in a burglary in Seattle that turns violent when his partner tries to double-cross him. Escaping to San Francisco, Jake looks up his brother, Eugene, and finds himself in the middle of Eugene’s marital and career problems, while gradually becoming attracted to Eugene’s wife, Rachel. The brothers’ painful memories of their childhoods are awakened with this visit, while Jake eventually turns back to his criminal pursuits, and involves Rachel. Meanwhile, Jake’s ex-partner continues his search for Jake, and the result is a violent convergence of events.
Reviews
“Jake Ahn, the titular thief of this blunt and often brutal crime novel from Chang (Fade to Clear), shoots his former partner, Bobby Null, after the latter betrays him in Seattle, and runs off to San Francisco (with a backpack containing $8,755 in cash) to hide with his brother, Eugene. Jake starts selling jewels, setting up his next score, and falling in love with Eugene’s wife, Rachel. Meanwhile, the mentally unstable Bobby luckily survives the bullet in his gut and embarks on a quest for revenge. Chang spends a little too much time on the flashbacks to Bobby and Jake’s brief partnership, but the sexual tension as Jake and Rachel fall for each other in the present day more than compensates. Also engrossing are both Bobby’s amateurish, often violent search for Jake and the detail Chang provides about robberies, from casing the stores to fencing the loot. Fans of hardboiled
and caper novels will be satisfied.”—Publishers Weekly
“Jake Ahn, the Korean American star of this immensely entertaining novel, is a thief, burglar, and safecracker—in short, the sort of charismatic scoundrel one would meet in a Hitchcock movie. But Jake hates talk like that. “Reality is brutal,” he says, and demonstrates. We join him in flight to Los Angeles from a partner’s betrayal in Seattle. The partner would up being gut-shot—by Jake—and left for dead in a dumpster. Jake hopes to hide out with his brother, with whom he’s had a rocky relationship dating back to childhood. Here’s where Chang carefully darkens his story without compromising the relentless plotting. Jake’s brother is a disaster in his job and his marriage, and his desirable wife hooks up, in all senses, with thieving Jake. “It’s all tax free,” she marvels as they plot a heist. But the body in the dumpster has crawled out seeking revenge, and Jake’s sad brother is catching on. The finale is 50 pages of beautifully choreographed violence that manages to be witty and thoughtful through all the mayhem.”
—Don Crinklaw, Booklist
“Intricate details make this heist-centered crime story literary and memorable. Leonard Chang’s novel The Lockpicker is a bit of a hybrid—a pulp crime novel that also becomes a story about the effects of a violent upbringing on an adult’s choices. Entertaining and with a well-paced literary style, this simple crime story becomes something more memorable.
Jake Ahn is a professional jewel thief who has to flee his home in Seattle after a robbery goes bad. His partner tries to burn him, and he leaves that new partner for dead in a dumpster. Without anywhere else to go, Jake pays a surprise visit to his brother Eugene in San Francisco. Eugene has his own problems—a work life that’s falling apart, serious financial woes, and a marriage in peril. While staying at Eugene’s apartment, Jake has to deal with selling the stolen jewels he brought with him, while using his lock-picking skills to plan additional heists. At the same time, he develops complicated feelings for his attractive sister-in-law and has to deal with how the physical abuse he and his brother suffered as children shaped their relationship. Unbeknownst to him, he’s also the target of his former partner, who survived and is bent on getting revenge against Jake—if he can find him—and is brutally interrogating possible contacts along the way. The story uses its time line well, interspersing Jake’s stay in San Francisco with scenes from the house robbery that got him into that predicament, the parallel story of his former partner’s process to track him down, and flashbacks to scenes from Jake and Eugene’s childhood. All these plot points work up to a seemingly inevitable conclusion, but there are enough interesting details and snappy dialogue along the way to make the journey there work. The book uses a great deal of detail in describing how Jake picks locks, how he learns to crack safes, and how he tries to figure out which jewelers and pawn shops might be willing to purchase clearly stolen merchandise. That attention to detail pays off, and helps make The Lockpicker a solid genre novel.”—Jeff Fleischer, Foreword Reviews
Praise for Leonard Chang
“Chang is patient and precise. His knack for dismantling sentiment and rendering the real is stunning.”
—Michael Martone, author of Alive and Dead in Indiana
“Mr. Chang…creates characters who earn our quick attention and sympathies, and he describes events and emotions with equal grace.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Chang’s gift for unsentimental storytelling is indisputable.”
—Library Journal
“Chang writes beautifully about the wounds of his characters and the wounds of society as a whole.”
—James Sallis, author of Drive
“The key is character. Chang works like a painter, carefully brushing strokes of truth and depth on all of his characters.”
—Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch novels
“Chang’s novels…are the most entertaining, enjoyable books I’ve read in recent memory… He has slipped into a groove of mastery and confidence.”
—KoreAm Journal
“Chang is…one of the most audaciously independent and intriguing writers in Korean American literature today.”
—Korean Culture
“Chang restores my faith in the power of the novel to illuminate a way of life. He deals in a startling and disturbing way with the constantly recurring American themes of race, ethnic strife, class conflict, and the dream for a better life.”
—Ernest Hebert, author of The Dogs of March
“Chang continues to explore the Korean American experience… He explores the immigrant experience, the presence of racism in both the white and Korean communities, the experiences in a dysfunctional family, school bullying, and the pursuit of the American dream.”
—Bill Drucker, Korean Quarterly
Additional Information
Click HERE to do a search for this book. You will find more information, reviews and additional purchase locations.
