The Lock Artist

Michael has not spoken since he was eight years old, since the day of the trauma the whole book circles and withholds, the event the Michigan papers called a miracle because the boy survived it. What the silence left room for is the gift: Michael can feel his way through any lock made, house locks, padlocks, and finally the great steel puzzle of a safe, an ability the novel treats with a craftsman's reverence, pages of tumblers and drive cams rendered like music theory.

Hamilton tells it from prison, Michael writing the story down because writing is the only voice he has, and the telling braids two timelines: the teenager pulled into the trade, a Detroit connection, a Ghost who brokers boxmen to crews across the country, jobs that take him across the country, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, and go right then terribly wrong, and, running beneath, the slow approach to the unspeakable day itself. At the centre of both is Amelia, the girl who communicates with him first in exchanged drawings, comic panels passed back and forth, love conducted entirely in pictures, and whose father's debts are the hook that hauls Michael into the life.

The suspense mechanics are immaculate, each job its own set piece, but the book's real tension is the withheld childhood, released at last in the pages the whole structure exists to earn.

Around three hundred pages.

Best for readers who want the heist novel crossed with a mute narrator's confession, tenderness and tradecraft in equal measure.