The burglar who met Fredric Brown

Lawrence Block

Book - 2022

You've got a dream job, running your own cozy secondhand bookstore, complete with Raffles, your caudally challenged cat. And you've got another way to make a buck: every once in a while you put your conscience on the shelf and let yourself into someone else's residence, and you leave with more than you came with. You're a burglar, and you know it's wrong, but you love it-until the 21st Century pulls the rug out from under you. All of a sudden the streets of your city are so overpopulated with security cameras and closed-circuit TV that you have to lock yourself in the bathroom to have an undocumented moment. And locks, which used to provide the recreational pleasure of a moderately challenging crossword puzzle, have... become genuinely pick-proof. Meanwhile, internet booksellers have muscled your legit enterprise into obsolescence; the new breed of customers browse your bookshop, find what they're looking for, then whip out their phones and order their books online. But suppose you wake up one morning in a world just like the one in which you fell asleep--with a couple differences. The Metrocard in your wallet has somehow changed color and morphed into what's called a SubwayCard. Puzzling, but you swipe it at the turnstile same as always, and it gets you on the subway, so what difference does it make? That's not the only thing that's changed-the Internet's as robust as ever, but nobody seems to be using it to sell books. Doors are secured not with pick-proof electronic gizmos, but with good old reliable Rabson locks, the kind you can open with your eyes closed. And where did all those security cameras go? All of a sudden you've got your life back, your bookshop's packed with eager customers, and how are you gonna find time to steal something? Well, just suppose one of the world's worst human beings has recently acquired one of the world's most glamorous gems. When the legendary Kloppmann Diamond is up for grabs, what can you possibly do but grab it? And what could possibly go wrong?-- more