THE STOLEN COAST, by Dwyer Murphy
If you, like me, lament the absence in modern-day Hollywood of the whip-smart neo-noir thrillers that flourished in the 1990s — films like “One False Move,” “The Last Seduction,” “After Dark, My Sweet,” “Red Rock West” and “Out of Sight,” to name a few — then I have great news for you. It comes in the form of Dwyer Murphy’s second novel, “The Stolen Coast,” which offers all the abundant pleasures of those films, and more.
Of course, many of those movies, like “After Dark, My Sweet” and “Out of Sight,” were themselves based on classic noir novels, and Murphy’s follow-up to his strong debut, “An Honest Living,” makes a convincing case for inclusion on that shelf. It’s a twisty, enthralling heist yarn, sure, but what strikes you most is the confidence.
As the editor of CrimeReads, a website devoted to crime fiction, Murphy certainly knows the canon and he makes it clear that he’s taken his studies seriously and applied them exceptionally well. He deftly conjures a universe of hucksters and operators that’s sodden with atmosphere, crisscrossed with shadows (literal and moral) and loaded with the threat of a double cross any time two people shake hands.
The two hand shakers at the center of this story are Jack and Elena. Jack is a lawyer for the family business started by his father, an ex-spy. The business: hiding people, typically for shady reasons, by shuffling them around Onset, Mass., a small tourist town that’s just down the coast from Cape Cod.