Page 45 Review by Stephen
"Before it was over Tracy did get the answers he wanted, and a few he didn't. But it seemed to him that was just the nature of answers."
Is family a trap? Tracy Lawless might come to believe so.
A soldier court-martialled, confined and now released after some "episodes" in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, he returns to his home city to solve the riddle of his younger brother's death nearly a year earlier. It's a long game involving patience, surveillance, and infiltration after building a reputation, for Ricky had fallen into his father's life of crime and become involved with a particular group of heisters and more than involved with the woman in their midst.
So does Tracy.
Wracked with guilt about what he sees as abandoning his brother, he recalls their different relationships with their father, and the separate courses which those relationships and their difference in age set them on.
"If only you'd been a couple years older... If only your legs were long enough to reach the gas pedal."
Phillips gets slicker and slicker, his twilight faces effortlessly expressive, and I know it's a little thing, but I love the shapes of the speech balloons, slightly more ragged than most: it helps integrate them into the artwork.
Brubaker as always knows his stuff, like what makes the ideal model for a getaway car. Once again he builds a compelling narrative around a couple of "jobs" which themselves are bursting with tension, but it's about what makes people tick underneath, how they got where they are, and whether they understand that before it's too late.
We keep the other volumes in stock as well, but all six volumes of CRIMINAL are structured so that you can pick up each one separately if, for example, you prefer this scenario to the last. As with the new edition of CRIMINAL VOL 1, the original landscape covers are now included in their ISBN-free glory.
