Former Army Ranger Van Shaw is trying to turn his life around. He’s working part-time jobs in Seattle to try and earn enough money to buy the supplies he needs to rebuild the house he inherited from his grandfather, but he keeps coming up short.
One day, while working on his house, a car pulls up that he doesn’t recognize. Out jumps Mickey O’Hasson, an old friend of Shaw’s grandfather, Donovan, or “Dono” for short, who was just released from prison. Dono and Mickey used to work jobs together, and now O’Hasson has a new score all lined up–but nobody to help him.
According to Mickey, Karl Ekby–one of Los Angeles’ most notorious heroin dealers– keeps a safe stuffed with gold in the floor of his Seattle office. He has the details thanks to some info an inmate slipped him in prison, but nobody with safe-cracking skills to take the job with him now that Dono is dead.
Torn between wanting to stay on the straight path and needing cash to finish his house before the season changes, Shaw reluctantly agrees to go with Mickey and crack the safe himself–one of many skills he learned in his previous life full of crime. But once the job gets going, things take a turn for the worse in a hurry, proving that when something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
The “easy score” turns out to be anything but, and Shaw and Mickey walk right into a trap. Such is the life of a career criminal who tried to go straight and fell back into the game, but Shaw won’t quit there. Unsure who set him up and why, Shaw’s life starts to quickly unravel into a world of threats, trouble, and living on the run as he tries to settle the score and put the life of crime behind him once and for all.
Hamilton’s first two books in this series were solid, but Every Day Above Ground is his best work yet. There is so much packed into this one that readers will struggle to set it down once the plot takes off, which it does right away. Shaw is a really intriguing character, and Hamilton has done a fantastic job developing him. He’s a little bit of an antihero, but he has enough good qualities that readers will find it easy to root for him.
Falling somewhere between a heist thriller and crime novel, old habits die hard in Every Day Above Ground, the latest nail-biter from Glen Erik Hamilton.
Book Details
Author: Glen Erik Hamilton
Series: Van Shaw #3
Pages: 384 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 0062567381
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: July 25th, 2017
Book Spy Rating: 6.5/10
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