ALL WE TRUST

Two men entangled in a criminal enterprise face the prospect that they could betray each other.

Several key elements of this novel will be familiar to readers of Galloway’s previous book, Just Thieves (2021)—close friends are embroiled in the lower levels of a criminal enterprise, sketchy on the details, until one of them throws a wrench into their joint existence. The two men here, widower Al and divorced father Peck, are also half brothers. Al’s hardware store and the Flying F, a bar Peck used to own but where he now just works, are two pieces in a money laundering scheme overseen by a man whose name is represented by a long black bar. Things are OK if tense until Al’s hard drive, reportedly containing $7 million worth of cryptocurrency, disappears, and Al is convinced Peck stole it, because he gave Peck the passwords years ago—and the drive may also contain incriminating information that Al was prepared to hand over to the district attorney at Peck’s expense. Then Al himself is in the wind, and Peck has to become the leader and not the follower, an uncomfortable role: “I wasn’t sure I could be on the other end of the leash, the one needing to take control when necessary.” The first-person narration switches between Peck and his 16-year-old daughter, Sara, wise to her father’s criminal enterprise beyond her years, who has her own ideas of how to unstick her father and uncle from their situation. Galloway’s latest noir has a lot of stuff going on—family drama, betrayal, poisonings, kidnappings, jaunts to Mexico—but the narrative proceeds at a more halting pace. Characters talk at and around each other in rapid exchanges almost as much as they talk directly to each other. Readers who like their noir thrillers extra heavy on the thrills may want more, but when the novel ends, rather abruptly, they’ll also find the characters easy to miss.

A family-driven crime novel with literary sensibilities that rounds many a corner, if not always at top speed.