Book Talk: Thomas Perry, ‘Forty Thieves’

Thomas Perry is a Southern California septuagenarian who has been writing best-selling novels since his award-winning “The Butcher’s Boy” was published in the early 1980s. I don’t think that I’ve read every one of his books, but I’ve certainly read and enjoyed most of them. 

“Forty Thieves” (2016, 353 pages in hardback format) is a bit different. The ending, which I’ll not expose, reminded me a bit of some of the foreign films that I watched when I was in college in the 1960s. Especially the French films, the ones that had me scratching my head, wondering about the ending, as I left the movie theater. It wasn’t that they were “bad,” it was just that they did not conform to the typical American-made movies of the era. Perry’s reputation and excellent writing give him the latitude to do something a little bit different from the expected.

This novel begins with Sid and Ronnie Abel, husband and wife former L.A.P.D. officers and current private detectives, being hired by Intercelleron Corporation to find the circumstances of James Ballantine, a scientist whose body was found a year earlier stuffed in a storm drain. Having concluded that Ballantine’s body was not dumped where it was found, the Abels trace the L.A. storm-drain system back to a likely spot where the murder took place. And, that’s where the first threat on their lives occurs.