Review: "Safe" by Ryan Gattis

I feel I have been giving too many five star book reviews as of late, but when you are on a roll, you are on a roll, and after finishing Ryan Gattis’ intense neo-noir Safe, the barrage of good books keeps coming may way. A few years ago, maybe 2015 if I could take a guess, I read his breakthrough novel All Involved, an adrenaline fueled, violence ridden fictional account of the LA Riots in the early nineties that backed up its substantial gore meter with different, most of the time conflicting points of view, a palpable narrative energy and a genuine empathy for people trying to do the right thing when the hands of fate are forcing you to do otherwise. It never failed to keep me on the edge of my seat burning through the pages, and his new novel is no different. A decidedly smaller book in length and scope, yet still arguably a period piece, since the events depicted occur almost a decade go, but in doing so, Gattis is able to heighten the emotions he so brilliantly construed in his breakout novel, all of which leads to a conclusion even more harrowing than in the first book, but one that is even sadder and more perfect. While All involved had multiple characters and took place over a week if I recall correctly, Safe only provides us with two points of view. First, we meet Ricky “Ghost” Mendoza, a safecracker for the DEA and a former criminal and addict trying his best to do right by the few people he cares about in life. During a routine assignment, he breaks open a safe and finds nearly a million dollars in cold hard cash. He thinks about those people in his life, whom desperately need this cash, and since he knows how he can pull it off, his decision to take the money is an easy one to make. There are other factors at play we learn about as we read on that allow him to steal the money, but I won’t spoil them here. But the people Ricky has knocked off are dangerous people, and it is up to Rudy “Glasses” Reyes, a man with his own secrets and empathetic loyalties, to handle it for his cold-blooded boss. One of the things I really enjoyed about this book are how similar Glasses and Ghost are to one another, to their painful backstories, to the people each one cares about, to the binds they find themselves in and how desperate they are to make things right. All of it leads to a final few pages that go from suspenseful, to sad to damn near perfect. It is not as violent as All Involved, not even close, with this book really only having one death with a few deaths in the past being described or implied, but it doesn’t make this book any less powerful. This is a powder keg of novel, one of emotion and not brutality, and, so far, the best crime novel I’ve read this year.

Rating: 5/5