Things start out uneasy for Anton Walker. He has a great job, a great wife and a wedding on the horizon. Things are looking good. Except his job duties and staff have been stripped away, he has been relegated to the basement, his wife keeps herself locked up in her study and after they finally marry after two cancellations he leaves his new wife on their honeymoon moving in to an isolated Italian village. What unfolds from this almost prosaic start is a literary crime novel heavy on character development and the relationship dynamics.
His forged Harvard degree, his missing secretary and her unexpected reappearance will provide the start to not only the upheaval of his life mentioned above but also the peeling back of the layers of his life. He comes from a family of criminals. His parents are fences, trafficking in antique stolen goods and his cousin forges documents and immigration paperwork, including passports. Anton was involved in the forgery business but successfully extracted himself from the life only to be pulled back in for one more job under the threat of being exposed. In a family of criminals the only crime is wanting a “normal” life and not possessing the desire to help his family. What Anton wants is such a foreign concept for his family of criminals that they don’t know how to support him in his desire to obtain it and do nothing to help him protect it.
As the main timeline moves along the back stories fill in by shooting and arcing away from the main story in grand and sweeping personal and family histories before coming back to the main story.
The Singer’s Gun may be more of a crime milieu novel then a full fledged crime fiction it is none the less quite brilliant.
