Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2026 July 22 • Wednesday

Last week I reported for jury duty and grabbed this book to take with me: The Procane Chronicle by Ross Thomas writing as Oliver Bleeck.

Whoops. It turned out to be the third in a series. But it was also the only book I had with me while sitting in downtown Brooklyn for about eight hours.

So I read it. The series character is Philip St. Ives, who makes a modest living as a professional mediator, doing things like delivering ransom payments and such.

This third novel was made into the Charles Bronson movie St. Ives, which I'll be watching soon. The book was excellent.

It's a twisty caper novel, deftly written with considerable wit as well as skill. It's too bad I didn't start reading Ross Thomas earlier. He's perfect for fans of Donald Westlake.

In this one, St. Ives is supposed to hand over $90,000 in exchange for a set of journals. The journals belong to a very successful professional thief and contain every detail of every heist he's ever pulled—and, crucially, the one he's about to do next.

So not only could the information in these volumes send him to jail but there's a big payoff at stake as well. And the stakes are even higher than that, but to reveal why would be too much. I've probably already revealed too much about the plot and it's a pleasure to experience how Thomas peels off layer after layer for the reader.

St. Ives is an appealing character, a nice change from a private detective or career criminal. He's somewhere in the middle.

Instead of a quick exchange of money for stolen books, St. Ives finds a dead body and is himself quickly arrested. Police involvement and number of corpses both quickly increase and St. Ives ends up learning a lot more about the professional thief's life than he imagined he would.

It was a lot of fun, like a less cozy, less comic, more streamlined Dortmunder novel. I'm looking forward to the next Ross Thomas book I read, whatever it is.

The first line is "It was near Twenty-First Street over on Ninth Avenue, one of those decaying Chelsea blocks that look as though they've been dipped in wet soot, and except for a couple of dreary bars kept stubborn closing hours, the laundromat was the only place open".