Jack tells us about how nutmeg or spray paint can be turned into weapons of torture. Jack seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of criminal tradecraft, and it’s his detailed descriptions of his work that fuels this novel’s narrative motor. Worse, he soon finds himself caught between the ruthless Marcus and Marcus’s even more ruthless rival, the Wolf, an Atlantic City kingpin who once used drain cleaner dissolved in milk to kill a little girl. The feds are in hot pursuit, and a security device in the money - involving an exploding dye pack and a GPS device - is set to go off in 48 hours, which means the clock is ticking for Jack to find the cash. His mission: to clean up a casino heist that’s gone south in Atlantic City, leaving one team member dead and another (who has the money) gravely wounded and missing. And so when Marcus tracks Jack down and gives him a gnarly assignment, he readily agrees. It’s a miracle that Marcus hasn’t iced Jack, and Jack knows he owes him big time. Westlake’s) coldblooded antihero Parker, an efficient, enigmatic professional thief with little inner life and even less family back story.

He’s also a descendant of sorts of Lee Child’s (actually Jim Grant’s) Jack Reacher - he too is a ghost who has no address, no phone number and likes to travel light - and Richard Stark’s (Donald E. He’s an expert in “the business of disappearing”: adept at the arts of disguise and using fake identification - passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates. Jack is a career criminal, or more specifically, a “ghostman,” who’s helped maybe a hundred bank robbers escape over the years. Hobbs - who graduated in 2011 from Reed College - seizes our attention and holds it tight, not so much through his plotting or his characters but through his sheer, masterly use of details, and the authoritative, hard-boiled voice he has fashioned for Jack. The same might well be said of Roger Hobbs, the author of this debut crime novel. “Wheelmen think differently from normal people,” says the novel’s narrator, known as Jack, who’s no slouch himself when it comes to details. A crucial clue in this smoking-fast new thriller is turned up by a “wheelman” - or car expert - who takes a BlackBerry photo of some muddy car tracks and using only his memory and an Internet connection is able to identify the tires that made those tread marks with 90 percent certainty in 10 minutes.

Ghostman by Roger Hobbs