CLEAN HANDS

3 stars out of 5

Have you ever seen that TV commercial for spaghetti sauce - Ragu, if I recall correctly? "It's in there," the narrator says. Well, somewhere in this book is a story, I'm sure, but most of it went over my head in the jumble of endless characters, excessively lengthy chapters that switched gears several times with no warning and an ending that, to put it mildly, was abrupt.

That's not to say there's nothing going on, although sometimes it was hard to tell who was doing what to whom. Here's what I know (or think I know): A merger between two banks goes south, creating two mortal enemies who are planning to fight it out in court. One of those banks is represented by a heavyweight law firm and one of its high-powered attorneys, Elizabeth Carlyle. One of their younger associates screws up big-time by putting sensitive documents related to the lawsuit on his cell phone, which then gets stolen as he moves through Grand Central Station on his way somewhere.

Worried that the documents would be damaging to the firm if they fell into the wrong hands, Elizabeth hires a woman named Valencia, who appears to be some kind of professional mercenary, to find the phone and the thief. But then, the bottom falls out when Elizabeth gets a threat: The documents will be made public unless her firm pays a hefty ransom. Elizabeth agrees, with Valencia in turn agreeing to follow the money surreptitiously and, hopefully, get it back along with those pesky documents.

From that point on, things got so convoluted and ridden with characters, those characters' relatives and relatives of their relatives that I really couldn't follow it (although I did deduce that almost everyone involved was following almost everyone else to varying degrees of success). It might have gone more smoothly had the chapters been shorter. It's not a lengthy book, but there are only four chapters, so just about every "set" of characters gets a place in each one, but with zero transition. Many times I had to flip back a page or two in my Kindle when I realized I wasn't reading about the characters I thought I was.

In the end, although technically the writing (as in grammar, punctuation and spelling) had no noticeable glitches, I'm afraid this one just didn't click with me. Just the same, thanks to the publisher, via NetGalley, for the pre-publication copy.

Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2020); 288 pp.