The Burglar: A Novel

Elle Stowell is a thief. She chooses the houses to steal from carefully. She looks at wealthy neighborhoods, studies the inhabitants until she knows their schedules by heart, and tries to destroy nothing on her forays. She goes for the small items ...money and jewelry mostly. She's been highly successful .. until tonight. While exploring the house chosen for tonight she experiences something she could never have imagine. In the mater bedroom, 3 bodies are laying on the bed. Two women and one man ...each with a bullet hole in the head. What she also sees is a camera ... and it's running. Thinking quickly, she grabs the camera and gets out the same way she got in ...barely ahead of the black vans screeching to a halt in front of the house. They aren't cops .. or if they are, they're using very different transportation and cops don't usually have silencers on their guns. Thinking quite clearly, she knows they have come for her. Somehow, they know she's there and is a kind of witness. Later, when her best friend and her date are killed in the same manner, Elle decides to fight fire with fire. She's going to find the killers ..... before they find her! This story moves at the speed of light and is a real page turner. Elle is a stupendous character .. young, quick-witted, intelligent, even has a sense of humor at times. Her chosen profession seems to fit her perfectly. The ending was a little let-down for me. It came abruptly and leads me to believe either the author got tired of writing .. or ... maybe this is the start of a series. Many thanks to the author / Grove Atlantic / Netgalley / Edelweiss for the advanced digital copy of this crime thriller. Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

BOTTOM-LINE: Love Perry but this is not his best work . PLOT OR PREMISE: Elle is an old-fashioned cat burglar with updated methods to tell her when houses with valuables are likely to be sitting empty. And she happily liberates them, feeling no remorse because the people are rich and she mainly takes things that are insured. Cash, jewels, guns. Which is all fun and games until she walks into the master bedroom at an empty house and finds three dead people sharing a bed after sharing each other. . WHAT I LIKED: The initial premise is strong, and watching her case, enter and rob houses is exciting. The initial twist is that the murders were accidentally recorded on a nearby camera, and Elle has to steal it to wipe the memory of her entrance. Her sense of ethics requires her to edit the footage to remove herself and then return the camera before the police find the bodies. But somehow the killers are looking for her, they know she was there and maybe saw too much. . WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: Elle is supposed to be young, hip, and in the criminal underworld…and then spends more than half the book thinking the rough crowd in suits following her are probably cops, even after it is clear there is only one group looking for her, not two, and somebody killed her friend and the friend's boyfriend. Everything about them screams mercenaries / ex-military even down to their office location, but nope, she keeps thinking they might be cops. Right up until she sees them shoot two people. A little slow on the uptake. In the middle of the "case", a hit man comes after her, but rather than kill her as he is supposed to do, he plays with her for days trying to get her alone. Which he could have done by force ANY day and moved on. Whatever. She then turns into super sleuth to ferret out who they are, document all the evidence she'll need to turn over to the police (i.e., days of surveillance and note-taking). At the end, the entire motive for everything is revealed in page after page of exposition, just dumped on the page by the bad guy which she conveniently records. And then it ends with only the barest of explanations of what happens to people, and her looking for work after getting out of the burglary game. Like maybe being a private investigator in a sequel, perhaps? While dating a new boyfriend she didn't even really like. . DISCLOSURE: I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I am not personal friends with the author, nor do I follow him on social media.

Good book, quick reading.