A haunting yet beautiful tale of morality and redemption told alternately between a safe cracker for the DEA who decides to steal the money in a safe he opens and the lieutenant in a criminal gang who is tasked with hunting him down. A wonderful narrative full of interesting and very real characters who justify their bad deeds as they are doing them for good reasons. So much more going on that I wont spoil for you, just know this a book you should pick up and read. Ryan Gattis is fast becoming the author everyone should read everything he's written. Marvellous stuff.

Safe is the latest book from Ryan Gattis, set over 48 hours with a backdrop of the dark underbelly of Los Angeles and its drugs gangs. Gattis uses two voices to narrate the story, in the form of Ricky “Ghost” Mendoza and Rudy “Glasses” Reyes with a punk rock mixed tape giving the story an old school vibe. This old school vibe can be seen as an American version of Robin Hood, with guns, drugs, money and cancer running central to the story. Ghost is a reformed drug addict, who is now a locksmith, and safe cracker for the DEA, who when the story opens is cracking a safe of a major drug dealer for the agency. He has been left alone by the DEA agents who leave the scene as he cracks the safe, while they have gone he also removes a large amount of money, $887,000. Unfortunately, his car has been seen and the gang will be searching for him within a few hours. Glasses is sent by his boss to find the missing money and get it back, as he cannot be seen to be going weak with a sneak thief. What we get is the back story to why Ghost has taken this money, and he is not planning on keeping a penny for himself. As he drives to meet his friend who will pay off people’s mortgages for them as they are heading for trouble as the financial system is crashing. Ghost has become Robin Hood in his desire to help unfortunate people who will never know him, as he knows he is going to die, if the cancer does not get him then a bullet will. Glasses has his own private reasons for looking in to getting out of the drug trade, and he is not afraid to act covertly to further his interests. He is a husband and a father and he is getting desperate to escape the clutches of his boss and the violence of the drugs trade. He knows that leaving the gang culture and life is not easy and like a cancer will slowly kill you. Gattis’ uses vernacular language to voice the characters and gives it authenticity, and the narrative is better for it as this is a fast-moving thriller. Amidst the violence, there are touching moments of tenderness Ghost when he thinks back to Rose and Glasses when he thinks to his own family. This is a wonderful story, full of hope and tenderness, things not normally associated with a thriller, but this book is better for it. There are mutual definitions that could be used for the word safe, from where we see money and drugs, to something far deeper. Safe is a book that will live long in the memory.

Last year one of my best reads was All Involved by Ryan Gattis, so I was eager to get a proof of his new book Safe. Set again in LA it follows the story of Ghost, a safe-cracker working for the police and FBI, who has a plan to put his hands on some serious money. The money in question is drug money, and taking it will no doubt involve some personal risk. Ghost is no simple, greedy thief though. At the same time we see the story from the point of view of Glasses, a gang member who has got an equally dangerous plan of his own. The time span is less than a week, the plot moving speedily between the two characters' situations, heading towards a gripping ending. For anyone who likes edgy, fast paced thrillers this comes highly recommended.

Ryan Gattis’ All Involved was my favourite novel of 2015, so Safe had big boots to fill. That novel delivered like a gut-punch that kept me rocked back on my heels, and what impressed me most was his ability to connect me as a reader to his characters on a deeply human level. That a small-town Yorkshire girl can feel the motivations of LA's criminal class shows that Gattis digs at the very core of people. In Safe, he shows this skill again. Back in downtown LA, each of his characters is laced with both sweet and salt, tender and tough. Gattis exposes something raw and fragile about us whilst hitting our senses with the blunt force of an often brutal existence. Just. Bam… The action in Safe can be measured in hours rather than days or weeks, and alternates between two characters – Ricky ‘Ghost’ Mendoza Jr. and Rudolfo ‘Glasses’ Reyes – two guys on opposing sides of an opportunistic safe heist, spinning like a tossed coin of action and consequence, where either could end up dead. Set against the backdrop of the American financial crash of 2008, I was once again left debating what constitutes good and bad, or right or wrong. Gattis has a knack for pulling back from the black and white and playing instead with all the shades in between. What’s striking about Ghost and Glasses is just how similar their motivations are, in spite of their opposing positions. Love, grief, pain, addiction, remorse, redemption. Safe has it all. There’s even a mix-tape. (And, man, if you’re going to scrape at the emotional bones of a character, you are going to need a good soundtrack, right?). Safe presses emotional bruises, and it confirms for me that Ryan Gattis is the sort of universally wise writer that I really want to share with readers. If you want a great, tense, thought-provoking thriller, this is most definitely the book for you.

Perhaps one of the grittiest and most raw novels I’ve read in a long while. I certainly felt that spending so much time with a reformed drug runner turned double agent left me feeling exhausted..in a good way. There’s plenty of drama here but good, raw honesty in the way the characters are portrayed and even down to how they speak and to each other in particular. This is not the La the tourist board would have you believe. It’s the mean streets of the drugs gangs and those where there is a large Mexican and hispanic population. The areas are those of the ‘projects’ where the poverty and social deprivation is everywhere, but it’s also where the heart and the humour of a people often lives too. It all feels very real and very threatening but it fast paced. Not the heist novel it’s billed to be though – I think it’s more than that. A raw honest look at the underbelly of the city – but not for the fainthearted!