ONE LAST JOB

A teenager gets eye-opening glimpses of the criminal underworld when a prized family memento is stolen.

Short sentences, generous line spacing, and amped-up pacing combine to ease reluctant teen readers into this tongue-in-cheek caper. As a way to keep him off the mean streets, Mikey has been hired by his single mom to tend to her ailing octogenarian dad. When a burglar breaks in and takes his dead grandma’s necklace, Mikey’s first impulse is to call the police, but Gramps, being an ex-con and (supposedly) reformed pickpocket, recruits him instead to help get it back without letting his mom know. A string of hilariously improbable coincidences and narrow squeaks later, Mikey has traced the necklace to the neck of a local drug kingpin’s third wife—setting the stage for Gramps to pull a slick switcheroo in the midst of an elegant soiree and, notwithstanding closing mutual vows to stay on the straight and narrow from now on, the probable blossoming of a beautiful partnership. The comically inept burglar (Gramps: “I can’t understand you…I’m not wearing my hearing aids. But that rag over your mouth? It isn’t helping. Maybe if you take it off?”) waves a gun around, but the level of actual violence is low. Gramps reads as White, and some secondary characters are cued as Korean; other characters are racially indeterminate.

A clever variation on the theme of intergenerational connections.