Donnie Chariot, aka The Book, has been a money-making machine for organized crime for decades. A genius when it comes to numbers and odds, Chariot has become a legend by seeing the patterns that not even supercomputers can see. By massaging just the right odds with careful bets, Donnie can set in motion huge paydays for those in the know. His success has made him wealthy, and his violent, businesslike approach to torture and murder has made him a power broker in the criminal world—and driven his daughter, Donna, out of his life. Recently, The Book has been slipping, and a doctor’s appointment confirms it: Donnie is battling Alzheimer’s, and his mental superpowers are almost gone. A series of bad bets results in unusual losses for The Book—and his partners, who become concerned that he’s playing a game with their money. Donnie knows that the only way to save his empire and protect his family is to convince his daughter, who shares his supernatural skill with betting odds, to help him get out of the hole. The only problem? After a traumatic childhood marred by violence, Donna wants nothing to do with her father—and definitely doesn’t want her daughter, Alexis, around him. But when Alexis is kidnapped and the ransom is for The Book to start winning again, all bets are off.
In BREAKAGE, David-Michael Harding’s prose is clear and full of bounce; his characters have distinctive rhythms and he captures the menacing tone of career criminals in a naturalistic way that never feels forced. The Book is a great character concept—a cold, violent man who simply sees things others don’t, but also a frail human being who is mourning the loss of his independence and power in real time. The plot is agreeably twisty, although some of those twists are courtesy of a fairly stock Idiot Character, the sort who shows up in stories solely to be incredibly dense and make incredibly terrible decisions in order to blow up the best-laid plans of others. Harding also has a tendency to overwrite; conversations that could be just a few lines go on for pages as characters repeat their positions, threaten each other, and then return to the original topic. It’s not a problem throughout, but the places where this sort of looping writing occurs quickly become tiring. And at one or two points in the story there’s a bit of too-clever plotting leading to some implausible elements, like the extremely complex way the granddaughter alerts her family to her location. Yes, she’s a numbers genius just like her grandad, but it stretches belief that everyone notices what she’s doing at exactly the right time, interprets everything exactly correctly, and knows precisely what to do—not to mention the fact that all of it is engineered by a seven-year-old kid. Taken independently, none of these relatively minor flaws is terminal, but encountered all in the same story they do drag things down a bit.
David-Michael Harding’s BREAKAGE is a fine crime thriller with some unexpected ideas, well-drawn characters, and a well-constructed plot that keeps the reader on their toes. Definitely worth checking out.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader