Brendan Lavin gets out of Rikers and tries to go straight, but money is tight and he joins a crew to take down an armored car. It goes wrong, blood is spilled and he flees New York. Cut to 12 years later, shortly before the Year of the Tiger begins in 2010, and he’s a whole new man. He owns a bakery in Shanghai, has a wife and child. Life is good. Then his past catches up with him, and he’s forced to become a criminal again to keep his family safe.
So then... wait, did you say he owns a bakery in Shanghai?
Enjoyment of this novel may depend on how you feel about that. Author Kirk Kjeldsen lives here and has decided to write a hardboiled American crime novel based in our fair city, and to some extent he succeeds. The plot rolls along efficiently, Brendan is a suitably compromised but ultimately decent protagonist and there are some nifty twists, as well as a nicely judged downbeat conclusion. The problem is it feels about two edits from being done; the bread has not quite risen.
On the plus side, it’s great fun to read about shoot-outs on former French Concession streets some of us live on and a diamond heist on the corner of Wukang and Tai’an. Kjeldsen shifts his characters around Bund bars, hidden lanes and buildings under construction, and as an actual resident does Shanghai far better than people like Tony Parsons have managed in literary attempts.
However, it doesn’t always come over exactly right. Brendan wouldn’t need to speak any Shanghainese, just Mandarin; the American villains get around a new city effortlessly, including nonchalantly carrying a bag of guns around the Metro (actually, this seems a missed trick; if the book was set a few months later, he could have described them simply ignoring the 12-year-olds manning pointless metal detectors). Having one of them be half-Chinese is clever, but they do seem to both get to and adapt to Shanghai awfully quickly.
Most glaringly, when the heist inevitably goes wrong, there’s an unexplained local woman shooting away with a handgun. It’s an implausibility that takes the reader right out of the story. If she’s meant to be undercover security (which doesn’t seem right in the context either) then we need to know this.
There are plenty of nice touches though. “Chateau Bacchus KTV”is witty, and the Fujian gangster who wants to take a picture with the “African” (i.e. black American) in the crew is all too believable.
Kjeldsen knows his genre, and there’s plenty to like here, but it never quite feels completely fleshed out. But if he tightened up and came back with a screenplay – now that would be fun.
// Tomorrow City by Kirk Kyeldsen is published by Signal 8 Publishing. The book is available for $13.21 on Amazon.com.
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