Buenos Aires Triad

The tale is based around petty crim Lucas who starts from lowly beginnings with watch thieving and then gets caught up in extortion rackets among the Chinese mafia in Buenos Aries. The reader gets a fairly gritty description of the life in an economically struggling Argentina with all the other problems that come with that, such as intercommunal issues.

Not being into crime fiction particularly, I enjoyed this more than I thought I might. Being short in length it did not overstay its welcome. Also, crime in Argentina is not a subject I had ever really thought about. Ideal reading on a rainy Saturday morning here in usually sunny Brisbane, a city that seems a world away from the trials and tribulations of South American crime.

This novel is only crossing over with genres I read - I am fond of classic noir (Chandler, Spillane, some Hammett) and I read only a little modern crime fiction, but I was offered a copy to read and review by the author, so here we are.

This is a short book, such that it could almost be a novella and as advertised, it moves fairly quickly through its plot. The timeline is strictly linear, and for me there were perhaps not the plot twists I might have expected for a crime noir story.

Set in Argentina, and with very good description and context demonstrates the author has put time and effort into the background details - which is important to make the story feel legitimate. It doesn't come across as a forced setting, but folds around the action in the story. Immigrants - Venezuelans, Bolivians and the Chinese form an important part of the story and the setting, as do the tourists who are at first the targets for the criminals.

There are few characters, and the ones we spend time with are reasonably fleshed out. The main protagonist, Lucas, enters a life of crime in small steps, moving from receiving stolen watches for his shop to acting as lookout, to being a part of the action. He finds himself wrapped up in the situation quite quickly and unable to extricate himself when things get a bit hot. Instead he flees the city, and on return, is again embroiled in trouble, ending up working for a Chinese crime organisation - one of the triad groups operating in Buenos Aires. The issue I had with Lucas is that he is not particularly likeable - there wasn't much to keep me hoping for a good outcome, as he never really showed much motivation to improve his life. I get that he was entangled and was in a position where he couldn't withdraw his involvement easily, but he perhaps lacked purpose in this respect.

As a debut novel, it was reassuring that the author showed restraint with his ideas. It is all too common that an author wants to take every idea, every thought, every character they have invented and shoe-horn them into their first novel, and as such the novel loses shape and suffers. In this novel the storyline and characters are much more on focus.

For me 3 stars, perhaps 3.5 stars, for a short, easy to read entertainment.