Criminal: The Sinners

Forced into paying off his dead brother’s debts, Tracy Lawless has been employed as a hitman for powerful crime boss, Sebastian Hyde.  For the past year, Tracy has been knocking off slimy folks deemed expendable by his maniacal master.  However, there’s been some issues with Tracy’s efficiency.  Regardless of his orders, Tracy has to make sure that his target is truly deserving of death, which as you can imagine, does not lend itself to an employer with little to no patience.

The only thing keeping Tracy on the job is just how good he is, so rather than throw away an asset like Tracy, Hyde gives him another job.  Several high ranking members of the crime community are being knocked off.  The problem?  These folks should be considered untouchable and seeing as Hyde hasn’t been authorizing these hits – Hyde wants to know who’s behind them.

Adding fuel to the fire, Tracy has been sleeping with Hyde’s wife for months, somehow managing to keep the affair away from prying eyes.  Not only that, but Tracy went M.I.A. from the US Military when he got tangled up in this mess and a rather driven military inspector is on the lookout for him, hoping to return Tracy to active duty.

What The Sinners lacks in steamy scenes, it excels in in the unsettling violence category.  Tracy Lawless appeared in an earlier volume of the series and Brubaker brings him back to close out his story with enough misdirection to throw the reader off the map.  While it isn’t quite as strong as the volume that follows it, it’s still an excellent piece of work.

While I suppose Frank Miller paved the way for modern noir with his Sin City series, I would go so far as to say Brubaker and Phillips have perfected the genre.