Greg is a serial bank robber - for the kicks, and the money gives him a living - and master of disguise. Until his latest where he kills a customer and takes their briefcase.
Willow and Parker have very little information to solve the case.
An okay story.
A NetGalley Book ( )

Winston Churchill is purported to have called Vancouver "the most beautiful city in the world." And with Douglas Coupland's "city of glass" occupying a setting punctuated by mountains, water, and forests, Vancouver would certainly be a prime candidate to win that category.

Laurence Gough's series of twelve Willows & Parker mysteries strive to portray a grittier underside to the beauty. Detectives on the Vancouver police force, Jack Willows and Claire Parker deal with the seamier side of humanity, with their perception of the city more as simply a grid of streets than a modernistic Eden.

The problem with the mysteries is that they're not gritty enough. Fall Down Easy is a procedural, but it's a PG-rated procedural. At its center is a serial bank robber who exploits unsuspecting young female bank employees to forward his crimes, only to treat them badly in the end, but in the end, though a cad, he really turns out to be a rather mild-mannered fellow. Willows and Parker themselves belong to a detective squad who, while world-weary, don't speak a single four-letter word. (Is this evidence of the legendary Canadian niceness?)

The book sticks closely to being a pretty strict procedural. None of the characters, particularly Willows and Parker themselves, carries much depth as characters. That was fine with me. It was sufficient to watch the case progress progress and for me as reader to try to figure out exactly what was going on. I happen to have read some of the later Willows & Parker books (Fall Down Easy lands about midway in the series), where they become domestic and we see more of their home life, and those episodes did nothing to strengthen their stories. Fall Down Easy kept its focus on the business-at-hand.

Unfortunately, as it comes to its climax, the Gough has chosen to give it a Keystone Kops-like denouement. So much for gritty underside.

I originally took up reading the Willows & Parker books because of my own fondness for Vancouver. I thought it would be fun reading stories where I could revisit a setting I loved. But having read three or four of them them now, I have to ask myself, "Is the series good enough that I would continue reading it if were set, say, in Des Moines?" And I have to conclude that it isn't. ( )

sometimes quite funny. at first i didn't like it but as i got into it it got better but very peculiar. ( )