BRIAN COFFEY – Surrounded. Mike Tucker #2. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.

   Brian Coffey is one of several pseudonyms used by prolific writer Dean R. Koontz. During the early 1970s, Koontz wrote a series of three caper novels featuring professional thief Mike Tucker – a more genteel version of Richard Stark’s Parker.

   Tucker’s straight job is as an art dealer, but in order to live the wealthy life-style he’s accustomed to, he and various other professionals plan and execute occasional big-money heists. Tucker has his principles: He steals only from institutions – banks, insurance companies, department stores – whose losses are fully covered by insurance. And he is good enough so that after fourteen operations in three years, he has never failed.

   Surrounded is the middle book in the series, and easily the best of the three. Tucker, along with two men, Frank Meyers and Edgar Bates, plan to rob the posh Oceanview Plaza shopping mall in southern California; the mall includes a bank. a jewelry store, and eighteen other business establishments. The plan is to hit the mall at night, get in and out as quickly as possible, and Tucker has it all worked out perfectly. Except for one thing – a vital. piece of information that Meyers, for reasons of his own, has withheld from Tucker.

   The result is that an alarm is sounded during the robbery, the police arrive, and Tucker and the others are trapped inside the mall, completely surrounded, with no way out. In a clever variation on the classic locked-room gambit, they manage to hide themselves so that the police aren’t able to find them and assume they somehow must have escaped. (The reader isn’t told their hiding place until some time afterward, so that you may either match wits with Tucker or share the cops’ frustration.)

   This is a well-written novel, ingenious and suspenseful. Tucker is no Parker when it comes to toughness, hut in the brotherhood of crooks he holds his own. His first caper, Blood Risk (1973), is also nicely done: It features another heist that goes sour, that of the biweekly take of a Mafia cell. Here, too, Tucker must improvise to save his own life and those of his partners. The last Tucker novel, The Wall of Masks (1975), is less successful: It has a convoluted and rather implausible plot involving Tucker’s specialty, art treasures (the Mayan variety), plus some strained humor.
   
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust