Outsourced

December 6, 2010
Zeltserman's tale of a botched bank robbery lacks the bite of his best noir work like Small Crimes and Pariah. Massachusetts software engineer Dan Wilson, who's hit hard times and just learned he's losing his eyesight, joins three other unemployed programmers in a desperate scheme. A glitch in a bank's security system will allow the four to pull off a heist during a time when the silent alarm signal won't reach the police. Predictably, things don't go as planned, and the resulting murder ups the stakes for the robbers, who begin to turn against each other. Since the safety deposit boxes they looted were the property of a vicious Russian thug, Wilson and his co-conspirators have more than the police to worry about. Some readers may wish the author had done a better job of making Wilson's transformation from computer geek to armed robber persuasive.

December 15, 2010
Dans job as a software engineer was outsourced more than 18 months ago. Since then, he has discovered that, at 48, hes viewed as a fossil; hes also losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa. Hes envisioning destitution for his family, and desperate times call for, well, robbing the bank that hired him to design its security system but outsourced the code writing to India. Dan has friends, also programmers, in the same situation, and they agree to take part. His slick plan is to rob only the safe-deposit boxes held by a brutal Russian mobster and finger a notorious Italian mobster for the crime. But the heist goes wildly, lethally wrong. Two bank customers are shot; the Russian, a former KGB interrogator, goes medieval; and the software engineers are forced into something not part of their skill set: improvisation. Zeltserman has used criminals as protagonists to fine effect in the past (Pariah, 2009), but this time his characters are honest guys who only begin to act like criminals after the crime. A small gem of crime fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)