American Criminal

He’s got a brother in a wheelchair who wrote a predictive algorithm called HEIST. On the Isle of Man, he ripped off Irish gangsters and Chinese hackers at the deadliest motorcycle race in the world. In Rome he robbed the cartel that robbed the smugglers that stole the artwork off the walls of the Galleria Borghese. And he's got a girlfriend named Mimi that "sounds like I want everything, and maybe I do."

But now Colton Ward’s stuck in the wastes of Minnesota between a brutal Nordic gang, a crooked reservation-casino operator, and a federal agent who might not share Colton's philosophy of disruptive capitalism. Colton will tell you to “never double-cross a triple-crosser." But you'll never know if he's lying or not.

American Criminal is an illustrated thriller imagined with a sophisticated sense of detail by the versatile Benjamin Percy with artwork by Michael Gaydos that makes the book feel like a graphic novel by the great team of Brubaker and Phillips or the fabulous Lazarus comics by Greg Rucka and Michael Clark.

American CriminaI is the first book I've read from a stylish publisher whose name sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel, NeoTextCorp. And so far my neocortex is responding powerfully to the independent publisher’s savvy project to cross-pollinate potent crime and sci-fi stories with cutting edge artwork. It feels both like an homage to the bygone pulps and a serious stride into a more dynamic future for fans of word and image dipped in a bulletproof gloss of gleaming noir. If you know NeoTextCorp then you know all this already. If not, then in American Criminal, Percy and Gaydos's compact, high-velocity thrill ride you’ll find characters you can feel for, root for, loathe, and fear. Which make is it a great place to start.