Crapped Out

Jack Hannigan, the widowed 78-year-old protagonist of this middling crime thriller from Moccia (Honolulu Nocturne), had a vaunted career with the FBI. But those glory days are long past, and he’s been relegated to a small apartment in the Sunny Laurel Senior Facility, near Orlando, Fla. Hannigan’s one contact with the outside world is his son, Jack, an attorney for the ACLU. His quotidian routine is disturbed when an obese, partially blind man, Bill Smith, moves in across the hall. The retired fed becomes convinced that Smith is Anthony Finelli, a onetime high-ranking mobster from Philadelphia and Atlantic City, N.J., who should still be serving time for tax crimes investigated by the IRS. Despite that conviction, Hannigan regards Finelli as the one who got away, because his own FBI unit hadn’t succeeded in amassing enough evidence to arrest the mobster. The bulk of the book involves Hannigan’s efforts to get his theory about Smith taken seriously. There’s little suspense, the characters feel more like types than real people, and a predictable romantic subplot involving Jack amounts to padding. Elmore Leonard this isn’t. (Jan.)