The Getaway Man

The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Simpleton car thief and getaway driver Eddie drifts in and out of prison until hooking up with J.C, a master planner. Things go south quickly when J.C.'s girlfriend Vonda wants a getaway man of her own...

I've greatly oversimplified the plot but that's pretty much it. The Getaway Man is a fast-paced page turner from Andrew Vachss. Not as bleak as his normal fare but it's still pretty good.

The narrator, Eddie, is slow but something of an idiot savant when it comes to cars and driving. He bounces from jail to jail and crime to crime, meeting women and learning lessons along the way. Then he meets up with J.C. and the book really takes off. The voice Vachss give Eddie is both believeable and sympathetic. You get the idea that Eddie's been lead around his whole life and isn't aware of it. When Vonda shows up, Eddie's probably the only one who doesn't know what her game is.

It's at this time you may hnotice the three star rating. For being less than 200 pages, the pace is a little slow for the first half. Sixty pages are spent on Eddie's background. It was necessary to the plot but it wasn't all that interesting. There's not a lot else to tell. It's a pretty slim book. Like I said in the previous paragraph, the ending was pretty predictable. Other than that, I have no complaints. Vachss proved he could write something besides one of his Burke novels in The Getaway Man.

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