Booklog 89/2022: Marshall Ryan Maresca: The Holver Alley Crew – Streets of Maradaine

[jacey]

I’ve been wanting to read this for a long time, but it’s not available on Kindle in the UK. I bought the real book, but the print is small. I begged a copy on pdf from DAW (who are my publishers as well) but it came up too small on my Kindle. Finally I figured I could read it on my 10 inch Kindle Fire because of the bigger screen. Whew! It was worth the wait. Highly recommended. I’ve read a couple of Maradaine books before (the police ones) but this starts a new sequence featuring Asti and Verci Rynax, who have decided to forego their larcenous ways and go straight – by opening a gadget shop selling Verci’s little inventions. It’s all going according to plan until all one side of Holver Alley burns down one terrible night, Asti, Verci and his family barely get out alive. Some of the other residents are not so lucky. The soon-to-be-opened shop is gone and along with it all the Rynax's money, leaving them with a debt. Having been brought up by a criminal father, the Rynax brothers have talents that they can use, so despite Verci’s disapproving wife, they set up a well-paying job, bringing in other Holver Alley residents as crew on the heist. It turns into something bigger when Asti discovers that the Alley didn’t burn by accident and the crew sets about making the perpetrator pay. Though this is the beginning of a new sequence and there’s a dangling thread for the second book to pick up on, this has a satisfying ending. The two main characters, Asti and Verci, are as close as brothers can be, but are also very different from each other. Verci  has a wife and a son and he wants to keep them safe. Asti, after working for Maradaine’s equivalent of the secret service is a broken man, barely holding it together and prone to a combination of berserker rages and PTSD. It’s not a good mix, and makes for a fascinating character. I loved this, and I already have book 3, but I have to figure out how to get hold of book 2 in a format I can read.