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DAMAGED GOODS
Roland Jefferson
Atria, Apr 2005, $23.00, 224 pp.
ISBN: 0743268865
Ten years ago, Alonzo “Motion Picture Bank Robber” Crane was sentenced by a court to spend twenty-five years to life behind bars for his planning and leadership of a failed Thomas Crown Affair imitation bank robbery. However, the Marion Federal Penitentiary Warden Cranford “The Speaker” Moffett offers Crane a chance for freedom. If he steals a steamer trunk from the top floor of a Los Angeles hotel, Moffett will get him a new identity and ergo a new life. However, this is not a simple B&E as the Department of Justice has the trunk under surveillance by armed feds.

On the outside for the first time in a decade, but under close scrutiny, Crane recruits his former cellmate Duffy to help him get the old crowd back together for the heist. While struggling to adjust to a wired world, Crane meets Duffy’s girlfriend Trixie. As Crane and Trixie begin making moves on one another, violent prone Duffy becomes angrier by the moment; the triangle jeopardizing the plan in which Crane hides the final act from everyone expecting no honor among thieves.

DAMAGED GOODS is a fast-paced crime thriller in which honor is tossed aside as an unnecessary evil by the key players, who each has their own agenda. Crane is a fabulous protagonist holding the action-packed story line together as the star. Filled with twists caused by treachery as no one trusts anyone else, fans of dark urban noir thrillers focusing on criminal behavior will feel Roland Jefferson provides terrific goods; now for that movie.

Harriet Klausner


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