Owen Laukkanen, Criminal Enterprise: The Sophomore Slump Strikes Again

Criminal Enterprise - Owen Laukkanen

Like many a man, Carter Tomlin defined himself by his profession - a profession in which he was successful; so successful that he and his gorgeous wife and two daughters could live in a St. Paul mansion and he could tool around in an $80K Jaguar. When the middle-aged accountant was handed a pink slip, however, life took a turn for the worse. As weeks turned into months and the bills mounted, Tomlin started getting desperate. 

The reason bank robbers get caught, some claim, is that they're stupid: they make mistakes, they brag to the wrong people, they flash the cash in the wrong place. Carter Tomlin, however, was smart. He robbed again. And again. And after a year or so, he'd assembled a crew of three and perfected his method - a method that, naturally, brought him to the attention of the local office of the FBI.

Enter Carla Windermere... the day Windermere showed up on his doorstep was the day the wheels started to come off Carter Tomlin's little Criminal Enterprise. It would only get worse... 

That's when he robbed his first bank. 

After a sparkling debut in 2012's The Professionals, perhaps Owen Laukkanen can be forgiven for a small letup, and - sad to say - he needs forgiveness. Criminal Enterprise is nowhere near the equal of that first book. When I heard he planned a second novel with the same pair of cops (Windermere and BCA agent Kirk Stevens), I was already doubtful, saying, 

Laukkanen is said to be at work on a second novel starring the same mismatched pair of cops... a classic salt-n-pepper team. Whether he‘ll be able carry it off or not is a tough call: much of the tension that makes The Professionals so readable arises from the author’s skill at making the… crooks so doggone likeable.

Unfortunately, he failed; failed for a number of reasons. Perhaps most important is that, Carter Tomlin is in no way as sympathetic as Arthur Pender and his "gang" from the first novel. Where Pender's crimes were bloodless and born out of a sort of cockeyed idealism, Tomlin starts out marginally sympathetic but it soon becomes clear that he continues to rob banks for the thrill and because he's a sadist: he enjoys the fear he sees in the eyes of his victims. Second, the interaction between Windermere and Stevens is almost painfully forced. Unlike the Pender case, there's no valid reason for the two agencies to cooperate on the crimes, so the two literally do not belong together.

The two novels share some basic factors, for instance the way in which a critical clue is generated by good old-fashioned police investigation. That's a good share - none of the "the clue drops out of thin air" sort of resolution hack writers depend on. They also have a "bad share" - the secondary plot of a bad guy hunting the criminal at the same time as the cops. It's almost as if Laukkanen simply used the first novel as a template for the first and juggled things a bit. 

Of all the sins an author can commit, over-reliance on coincidence is perhaps the most grave. Once I learned that Tomlin was volunteering to coach Stevens' daughter's basketball team (don't schools have teachers for that?), I groaned loudly enough to scare the dogs. That was just plain un-called for.  While Laukkanen managed to put together a heart-pounding finish and a couple of marginally interesting little plot twists, the sad truth is that Criminal Enterprise is a poor shadow of his first novel. A sophomore slump, indeed.