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167 pages Bling, by author Gerald Boyden, showcases the desperate lives of a group of criminals who participate in a jewelry store heist.
The men's poor decisions and destructive behaviors provide the meat for this crime novel.
The story is set in a blighted area of San Pedro, a port district of Los Angeles.
Tex Bradley is a tall, large man with a gambling problem who needs to pay off a debt quickly.
He seeks help from his friend Joe Bell, the owner of a small hamburger joint.
Tex owes $2300 to his bookie, Abdul Rockman.
Joe agrees to help Tex.
He contacts an old friend, Jimmy Winn, to borrow part of the money.
While Tex waits for Joe to pull the money together, he allows Pamela, a recently unemployed stripped to stay at his apartment until she can get her own place.
Their casual relationship becomes serious once Tex becomes involved in a robbery.
Doc Schnider, a career thief in his sixties, seeks out Abdul soon after being released from prison.
Doc outlines his plan for a jewelry heist that will yield millions.
He asks Abdul to contact a high profile attorney, Lon Emory, to finance the job.
Lon has a reputation of being tough and affluent, but as the story progresses, the reader learns that Lon's life is not what it appears to be.
At their meeting, Doc, Lon and Abdul work out the details of the robbery.
They recruit Tex, Joe and Jimmy to be the muscle, the driver and the safe opener.
Boyden presents the narrative portions of the story as if they are the outline for a stage play setup: Characters are observed in particular situations, but their inner thoughts and feelings are only expressed through dialogue.
Initially, this is distracting, but as the pace of the story moves into a steady rhythm, this "narrator as observer" approach allows the characters to tell their own stories in their own words.
As in his novel, Mystic Village, Boyden doesn't dive deeply into the backgrounds of his characters.
But in Bling, he manages to describe enough of the characters' current problems to encourage the emotional involvement of the reader as the lives of all of the main characters unravel after the heist.
There is a grittiness about this story that only works because Boyden successfully reveals the human side of each character.
All of the men are criminals, but they are also presented as human beings with aspirations, deficiencies and weaknesses.
Bling is a tale of crime and desperation.
The author infuses a sense of human frailty that adds texture and heart to the story.
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