Five Phantom Discount by Marcus FellMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
First of all, if bad language offends you, this is not the book for you. There's a lot of it.
Secondly, if you enjoyed Ocean's Eleven, this has a lot of the same elements. It starts out with a con man just out of prison who wants to do a job on a guy who is now sleeping with his ex-wife, for one thing. But it isn't just Ocean's Eleven retold.
It's set in a version of our world where some people can use magic, and this appears to be publicly known, since there are US federal laws about it; the main character, Frank Phantom, fell foul of these laws as part of a job six years previously, and has spent the interim in a prison for magic users. Now that he's out, he and his partner Clay Bishop, who were betrayed by Deacon, their third partner on that previous job, want to steal from him. Deacon's used two of the three wishes that the genie he gained through that heist granted him, in order to screw them over and reinvent himself, and is about to be elected as the Mayor of New York, as a prelude to running for president.
The book follows the usual beginning for a heist story; the team is gathered and told how impossible the job is. (I would note that not all of the impossibilities are really dealt with in the actual heist. In particular, (view spoiler) There's a creepy Ukrainian necromancer who can gather information from dead ex-employees of the security team; a technomancer hacker (a young woman whose grandfather was the first choice for the position, but he's dead); Bishop, who's a glamourist and can make things look like what they're not; Phantom, who's the mastermind, and can't work magic because he's on parole and has tattoos that prevent him from doing so or at least will report if he does; and Lemonade, a retired criminal who they convince to come back for one last job. (view spoiler)
There are two main ways of telling a heist story. One is for the reader to know the plan in advance, see it all go wrong, and then see how the crew improvise their way to success anyway (or actually have another secret plan which involved things going wrong in exactly that way). The other is for us not to know the plan in advance, but watch it unfold in narrative time, which is what this book does. Both can be enjoyable, and this plan is clever (and involves the main character going through some rough times). As already noted, not everything in the "this is impossible" scene gets addressed when the heist unfolds, though.
There's a lot of banter - sometimes, for me, too much; it bogs down the pace of some of the scenes, without being quite good enough banter to make up for it. A lot of it consists of people insulting each other and being mutually hostile, with, as I've noted, copious swearing. Sometimes it's creative and funny; other times, less so.
Not badly edited; there are a few of the usual issues, including dialog punctuation, the odd vocabulary error, unclosed quotation marks and missing or added words in sentences, but they're thinly scattered. As always, I include the disclaimer that books I get from Netgalley may (but also may not) receive more editing after I see them, but before publication.
Overall, it's a good heist novel, if you don't mind sweary and not very likeable characters who banter a bit too much, and can ignore or don't notice the fact that not all of the threads are tied up neatly. Those factors together dragged it down to the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list.
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