Why You'll Love This
A small-time burglar accidentally blackmails the CIA — and decides the best leverage is actually using their chaos blueprint on Los Angeles.
- Great if you want: sharp comic crime with genuine satirical bite against institutions
- The experience: fast, gleefully absurd, and escalating — like a controlled demolition
- The writing: Perry keeps the farce grounded with deadpan precision and crisp plotting
- Skip if: you prefer crime fiction with grit over comedy over consequence
About This Book
When a small-time thief breaks into a university lab looking for pharmaceutical cocaine, he stumbles onto something far more dangerous — a CIA-compiled blueprint for plunging an entire city into chaos. Deciding the smartest play is to actually use it as leverage, he sets Los Angeles on a slow spiral toward bedlam while a weary agency veteran scrambles to contain the damage before everything comes apart. Thomas Perry's premise is gloriously absurd, but the stakes feel genuine — because the chaos is incremental, escalating, and utterly logical given the people involved.
What makes this novel such a pleasure to read is Perry's deadpan command of tone. He plays it completely straight while the situation grows more and more unhinged, which is exactly where the comedy lives. The machinery of bureaucracy — government, criminal, and academic alike — grinds away with the same self-important seriousness whether the goal is sensible or catastrophic. Carl Hiaasen's introduction frames it well: this is the kind of lean, sharp, criminally underread thriller that reminds you how much fun fiction can be when a writer trusts his premise and refuses to wink at the audience.