Book Review: The Stolen Coast by Dwyer Murphy

By Simon Demetriou

Crime fiction gets a bad rap because it’s a genre where you can get away with a lot of literary sins provided your plotting is fast and twisty, and you stick to enough of the cliches that everyone wants from a crime novel. If you want to write a good crime novel, though, you need a compelling central character in possession of plenty of moral ambiguity and even more charisma. If you want to write a really good crime novel, you need that character’s internal monologue to be made up of razor-sharp description, coloured by varying parts gloom and optimism. The Stolen Coast is a really good crime novel.

Jack Betancourt is a Harvard Law School graduate from Onset, Massachusetts who loves a game of pickup basketball (more of which later), can rustle up a mean clambake, and has a fine appreciation of morna and fado thanks to his Cape Verdean heritage and his father’s fine record collection. He’s also de facto boss of the family business, which happens to be the engineering of people’s disappearances. Jack’s father leveraged a career as a spy into turning Onset into ‘a place you could go to live anonymously for a while, no matter who you were or what you had done’. Now, as the elder Betancourt struggles with the onset of Parkinsons, Jack has his hands full keeping clients hidden before their next moves as brand new people.

You might think that a life like this would keep anyone on their toes, but it so happens that the reappearance of Elena, an old flame with a colourful and crooked past, reminds Jack that things are feeling a little stagnant. When Elena drops word of her plan to carry off a diamond heist, it doesn’t take long for Jack to sign up.

Needless to say, things don’t run smoothly: the elements, misplaced trust, double-crosses that may or may not have actually taken place, and the challenge of figuring out what one actually wants out of life, all play a part in keeping the action in a state of riveting fluctuation.

Now, The Stolen Coast isn’t without fault. Mainly, Elena is a far less believable character than Jack; she gets given some good lines, but there are places where her dialogue and motivations ring hollow in a way that Jack’s never do. If we really want to quibble, the frequent, occasionally contrived, pickup basketball references might get on some readers’ nerves. But, honestly, it doesn’t matter. Yes, if Elena were drawn better, The Stolen Coast might ascend to the remarkable. As it is, for this reader – and, I suspect, most others – really good is more than good enough.