Prince of Thieves : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Boston Soul
Review: This is simply the best crime novel since "Mystic River" which is by another local, Dennis Lehane. It's an easy comparison. A a quartet of lifelong friends having been successfully robbing Boston area banks and getting away with it. They're all from Charlestown, a sister community with major similarities to Mystic River's supposed South Boston.Things get complicated when the female bank manager who is robbed inadvertantly attracts both the robbery mastermind and the FBI agent determined to bring them in.This is a book with a lot of character development, a zippy pace and a clear insight into this clannish Irish neighborhood. I couldn't take my nose out of it and heartily recommend it all around.

Rating:
Summary: Gets it right
Review: As a long time Charlestown resident, I can attest to the author's accuracy in describing the lay of the land.

I enjoyed this book more than Mystic River and way more than Boyos.

Rating:
Summary: Good Boston Crime Novel
Review: Chuck Hogan sets his new crime novel, The Prince of Thieves (Scribner, 384 pages, $15.75), at some intermediate point (1996) of Boston's transformation from gritty, proletarian city into the contemporary, gentrified amusement park it has become. Adam Frawley, 32, plainly a creature of the new Boston, is an ambitious, marathon running FBI agent on the fast track. In the novel Frawley chases a blue collar gang of Charlestown-based bank robbers guilty of pulling off a brazen early morning heist at a Kenmore Square bank.

The bank robbers are led by cool headed ex-con Doug MacRay, who, while at 32 the same age as Frawley, is already feeling like an anachronism in the new Boston. He's trying to keep his criminal gang of hockey and Nintendo playing childhood buddies from the old hood together, while struggling to stay on the wagon in booze soaked, blue collar Charlestown culture.

Thus does Hogan literally pit the contending sides of the changing city against one another. It may sound overly metaphorical, but Hogan pulls it off with an unpretentious delivery and a fast pace.

McRay's gang, moreover, is barely clinging to a disappearing working class life in Charlestown, living in a shared, inherited duplex in the old neighborhood where they grew up, which is rapidly transforming before their eyes into an exclusively professional district, inspiring predictable resentments. One of the gang goes on a very funny barroom tirade about the only way of bringing back the old Boston being the creation of some kind of environmental health crisis, which would be the only possible issue capable of driving the health obsessed yuppies out.

Even crime is changing, as high tech security measures make smash and grab tough guys like MacRay's gang obsolete, while a new breed of knowledge working criminal specializing in electronic crimes like identity theft rises up to take their place.

McRay, meanwhile, is going through an amusing existential crisis, complete with meetings with his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor and attempts to reach beyond his limited social experience and connect with Claire Keesey, the attractive young bank employee abducted by the gang during the Kenmore robbery, all while the feds close in.

The life of crime, at least as Hogan has it, is just another way of punching in; there's little glamor in plotting bank jobs for MacRay's crew, but many long hours of painstaking preparations, surveillance, casing potential targets, and tailing bank employees, all cumulating in the frantic moments and brutal violence of the crime itself, which Hogan does not romanticize.

In Claire, Hogan creates a compelling portrait of a woman suffering the severe psychological trauma and aftershocks of having been a victim of a violent kidnapping, the most painful aspect to her being the possibility that she allowed herself to be victimized.

When MacRay sees connecting with Claire (who doesn't recognize him because of the masks they wore during the Kenmore robbery), as a way of escaping his social limitations, the plot thickens, especially as agent Frawley also takes an interest in Claire.

The most distinctive feature of Hogan's new Boston seems to be its legions of unmarried young female professionals. This was a phenomenon unknown to old Boston working class culture. Prince of Thieves features the upwardly mobile urban female almost as a kind of ubiquitous backdrop, and Hogan riffs insightfully on their speech, their spending habits, their apartments, restaurants, bars, cars, and vacations. Agent Frawley's girlfriend, for example, is almost an archetype of MacRay's female new class nightmare; she's an ambitious, wired, knowledge working, cell phone toting waterfront real estate agent who spends her time obsessing over the hottest trends in neighborhoods, restaurants, and fashion. Even Frawley doesn't like her much.

Hogan knows his Boston. Readers familiar with street level Boston will appreciate Hogan's use of the city terrain: Agent Frawley commandeers a Green Line street car, office workers take lunch in the Fens, and scenes change rapidly from Kenmore to Brookline to Charlestown and back. Hogan even cleverly works a hip reference to the ubiquitous Dunkin' Donuts chain into a foiled bank robbery chase scene. At one point, Agent Frawley dwells on the inward curving chain link fencing on the bridge over the Mass Pike next to Fenway Park. Designed to prevent Red Sox fans from leaping off every fall, thinks Frawley. Whoops! Not anymore.

The Prince of Thieves is more than a story of a hard working gang of thieves and the cops who chase them; it's a novel of manners, containing much insight into the modern city and the struggles of gentrification. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: A terrific read!
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this well-written mystery/thriller. While I generally agree with the comparisons to Dennis Lehane, I don't this book is as dark as most of Lehane's. I found the characters and their relationships very interesting, and there are several excellent action sequences in the book.

Rating:
Summary: Better than Mystic River - A Masterpiece!!
Review: It is always a pleasant suprise to buy a book on a hunch and find that it was your lucky day. I had not heard of Chuck Hogan or of the other two books he has written, but on the strength of this novel, I have ordered them both. Doug MacRay is a product of Charlestown, Massachusetts which according to a character in the book "produces more bank robbers and armored car thieves than any other square mile in the world." Doug is both and the brains of a crew of thieves who are about to pull off a Morning Glory and a Jack in the Box robbery as the story begins. They have broken into the bank from a room above it and are awaiting the arrival of the branch manager to open the bank in the morning, hence the term of art to describe their methods. In casing the bank before robbing it, Doug has staked out the manager's apartment, followed her many places and has become attracted to the woman in a way that will lead him into a realtionship which has peril for both of them and for others as well. The crafting of this story is masterful. You will get to know the characters, you can hear their voices, feel for their problems and fear for their lives. I had thought that Dennis Lehaine had written the penultimate story obout this area of Boston. But, I had not met The Prince of Thieves. This is the best.

Rating:
Summary: Stephen King was right
Review: On the back of the dustjacket, King's blurb begins, "PRINCE OF THIEVES is a terrific read." Now, the truth is that those blurbs you see on dustjackets often aren't written with, shall we say, the deepest of feeling. But while I can't vouch for King's feelings, I can vouch for my own. And "terrific read" is a good place to start.

There were times, while reading Prince of Thieves, that I thought I was about to enter the world of Elmore Leonard, and there were passages that brought to mind Michael Mann's movie, HEAT. But this novel is too original, the characters too well drawn, the literary devices too clever for such shallow comparisons. Prince of Thieves doesn't quite pull you along like one of Leonard's novels. Rather, you have to pay attention, but the effort is richly rewarded.

I wish half-stars were available for the ratings; if they were, I'd have gone to four-and-a-half. But a five-star novel, to me at least, is the rare sort that you're still thinking about weeks (or months) later. That might happen with this one, but for the moment I'm prepared to say only that Prince of Thieves is indeed terrific.

Rating:
Summary: Best on Audio
Review: PRINCE OF THIEVES is a great story, but listening to it on audio is like watching a great action movie populated with fully realized characters. Donnie Wahlberg is pitch-perfect reading this narrative in a perfect Southie accent. I would imagine that in book form, the many interior monologues in this story may slow it down. In audiobook form, it's like this flawed anti-hero is telling you his twisted love story over a beer in an Irish pub. If you're already a fan of audiobooks, get this one - you'll enjoy the ride. If you've never tried audiobooks, you can't go wrong starting here.

Rating:
Summary: Will remind you of Mystic River and Good Will Hunting!
Review: PRINCE OF THIEVES is set in Charlestown, Massachusetts, supposedly a breeding ground for bank and armored-car robbers; however, this is much more of a character piece than a thriller.

It starts with an extremely impressive bank robbery. Hogan really knows his stuff, as we witness the robbers avoiding "dye packs" and pouring bleach to hamper forensic investigation. Claire Keesey, the bank manager, is taken hostage (and later released) when an alarm is tripped; and this is when the real story starts. The leader of the stick-up crew is "Duggie" MacRay, a former hockey player, who falls for the beautiful bank manager. So does FBI agent Adam Frawley, who suspects the bank manager may have been involved in the robbery. Some conflict also exists between Doug and Jem Coughlin, the loose cannon of the group, who pistol whips the assistant manager whom he blamed for triggering the alarm.

There are only three holdups during the entirety of the book. This work is much more reminiscent of MYSTIC RIVER and GOOD WILL HUNTING than a thriller. Hogan has the accents and mannerisms of the "Townies" down pat and he throws in a social issue to boot, the invasion of Charlestown by Yuppies. All of the robbers resent them and Jem especially sees himself as a Robin Hood character who's more into the high he gets while committing a holdup than the money.

Hogan, who lives in Massachusetts,limes Charlestown and the Boston area as a character in the book, using dense description to draw us in. We even get to go to a Red Sox game, especially appropriate during this happy time for Bosox fans.

Rating:
Summary: Reminiscent of Mystic River...
Review: This is an excellent novel about four friends who grew up together in Charlestown (the armoured car robbery capital of the nation). They commit robberies. The author does a wonderful job of portraying the relationships among the four men, while giving us a vivid portrait of Charlestown, both past and present. Our "hero," Doug Macray, is the ringleader of the group, and we see everything through his eyes. This book is as good as Mystic River and certainly as well-written--with more suspense! And--there's lots of action!

Rating:
Summary: Heat in Charlestown
Review: Well done cops and robbers, acknowledging a debt to the movies, this is a good read. Boston-based and authentic scenery add to the attraction. Go Sox, see Fenway like never before.