One of my favourite movies is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur, about a glamourous, if dissipated, gambler who plans a casino heist in 1950s Paris. One of my favourite books is Frederick Barthelme’s Bob the Gambler, about a regular guy who rents Bob le Flambeur and gets caught up in the casion scene of 1990s Biloxi MS.

So I’m an easy mark for The Absolute Perfection of Crime, a deliciously crafted nasty little novel about boredom, family, casino heists, and revenge. It clocks in at 128 pages, it’s like a dessert or better a cognac at the bar (orginally Lord Jim, but in a later scene it’s ben renamed after Herman Melville’s handsome sailor) where the crew hangs out when they’re not doing crimes.

“Cognac,” our narrator says, “that’s for old guys we used to say, we followed him, Uncle, and never left him when at dawn in front of an empty bottle he said: You just have to learn not to drink so fast. But that, even seven years later, we still hadn’t learned to do.”

There are few dazzling storytelling moves, the casino heist itself is a lot of fun, but the real draw is the narrator’s voice.

I think I’ve written about Eva Baltasar’s short Catalan novels before. I finally read the third, Mammoth, and I think Boulder—the first I read, the second in the triptych—remains my favourite. They’re all great individually and as a set they really shine as a frank look at what it is to be a human—and probably more specifically a woman, a queer woman—who lives among other humans. And sometimes goats.

What’s going on in Edmonton? There are so many exciting books coming out of Edmonton these days. You’ve got Premee Mohammed’s riveting speculative/fantasy/cli fi (I’m crazy about The Butcher of the Forest, a perfect little upsetting book), Anna Marie Sewell’s entertaining Humane and Urbane, which kick genre in the nuts with both knees, and, of course, Wayne Arthurson, whose Red Chesterfield is another perfect little upsetting book.

Add to that Conor Kerr, whose previous novels, Avenue of Champions and Prairie Edge have been on my periphery, if for no other reason than their kick ass covers. Pulp Fiction’s Chris posted about Beaver Hills Forever, Kerr’s new novel in verse about four Metis people getting through life. It lives up to the hype. In the same way I’m always down to read about a casino heist, give me all the dishwasher prose. Kerr nails the dishwasher stuff in here. Someone smarter than me should write about why dishwashers make good writers and vice versa. Orwell was a plongeur in Down & Out in Paris and London. Anyway, prairies, dishwashers, wanting something more, this book is a joy to read.