CODA

Eberz knows exactly what a thriller reader wants from page one, and he delivers it without apology. The cold open with Flannel and his bored, blood-splattered photographer is a genuinely nasty piece of genre craft — the detail of her sighing 'I'm starving' mid-torture, or Flannel adjusting the victim's chair angle for a better photo like a set decorator, tells you everything about these two without a wasted line of backstory. That's confident villain-building: menace delivered through behavior, not adjectives.

Then the book pivots hard into Smoke's world — Fifth Street, Rosa, Sal's Deli — and the tonal whiplash works because the banter is so well-oiled. The diner scene with Aimer ('I still carry a piece, you prick') has the rhythm of a real partnership built over decades; the running joke about Aimer's Hyundai and his lost Crown Vic does more character work than a page of exposition would. Smoke himself is a satisfying type done well: broke, funny, self-destructive, and quietly moral — the Chad/Sid beatdown earns its laughs ('Chad? Really?') while still landing the point that Smoke is dangerous when it counts.

The real structural achievement here is the parallel-plot setup: the tax-fraud syndicate voting by silent bourbon-toast to murder 'their' artist for the appraisal bump is a wonderfully cynical, specific engine for a plot, and it's not hard to see it colliding with Flannel's atelier of terror. That's a promise made early and made cleanly — exactly what this category rewards.