Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal

In this superb follow-up to An Ordinary Decent Criminal from the late Canadian author Van Rooy, ex-con Monty Haaviko, who's been a thief, a burglar, an armed robber, a smuggler, and a drug dealer, continues to try to put his past behind him and live quietly with his wife and son in Winnipeg. But Haaviko falls back into his old ways after Marie Blue Duck, a do-gooder seeking to smuggle refugees into the U.S. and Canada who can't enter legally despite their desperate situations, seeks to enlist his professional experience on the side of the angels. Of course, things don't go smoothly, and Haaviko must resort to violence to protect both Blue Duck's operation and his family. Van Rooy's wry narrative voice will be missed, though fans will have one last chance to hear it in the next book in the series, which Van Rooy finished before his untimely death at age 42 in January 2011. (July)