A Professional Review

A sterling review in a recent Entertainment Weekly -- along with a compelling plot summary -- convinced me to take a look at a new novel from a first-time author: The Professionals, by Owen Laukkanen. It's the story of post-college friends who, unable to land jobs, have taken to serial kidnapping in the hopes of slowly amassing enough money to retire. When one job fails to go according to plan, a detective and an FBI agent get onto their trail, and the chase begins.

The book is certainly a page turner. The construction is similar to that used by a lot of popular writers today -- nearly 100 chapters to a book, each a fairly short burst ending on a cliffhanger designed to continually pull the reader through to find out what happens next. The technique certainly works here; the book is compulsively readable, and made me set aside many other pursuits in my free time until I'd finished it.

But despite that major strength, the book does have a few flaws too. There are a number of characters involved, with the story following the perspective of not only the kidnapping ring, not only the investigators, but some others as well. Not all of these characters are as thoroughly drawn, and not all of them seem to behave believably or consistently the more the story races on. And frankly, there comes a point where I'm no longer sure who I should be rooting for. That's good in the sense that it's true to the moral ambiguity of the situation; it's bad in the sense that it makes the story hard to resolve. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the way it all ends, whether the people I truly wanted to win rule the day.

Plot is key here, and while it's a good one, some other aspects of good writing occasionally fall by the wayside. The truly clever and original turns of phrase in the writing are rather few and far between. The physical descriptions of the characters and environments are a bit threadbare in places. But maybe these are reasonable sacrifices in the name of preserving the compulsive readability.

In the end, I tore through the book quite quickly, and overall I'd have to say my enjoyment of it outstripped my hesitations. I'd grade the book a B. I could see reading this author's next effort, assuming it has as catchy a premise -- though I won't necessarily be telling everyone I know "you have to read this book!" in the meantime.