Onyx reviews: Three-Edged Sword by Jeff Lindsay

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 7/19/2022

Riley Wolfe is not modest about his abilities. Several times during this novel—and in the previous two that feature his capers—he claims to be the world's best thief. Although he's already extremely wealthy, he is easily tempted to commit robberies, especially ones that seem incredibly difficult.

He's also a master of disguise, rendering himself unrecognizable, not that many people know what he really looks like. He's a loner, trusting only a few friends/co-conspirators. He's also fiercely devoted to his mother, who has been in a coma throughout the course of these books. She's his Achilles' heel. Anyone who knows about her condition and the special treatment it requires could potentially track him down.

A government agent named Prescott doesn't need to hunt Wolfe down. Instead, he relies on Wolfe's vanity by laying a trap the master thief won't be able to resist. Prescott wants to force Wolfe to commit what, on the surface, appears to be an impossible robbery—exactly the kind of gig that's Wolfe's jam. The MacGuffin is a flash drive containing information that would create an international crisis if it fell into the wrong hands. The drive is stored in a vault at the bottom of a former Russian nuclear missile silo on a Baltic island guarded by elite ex-Army soldiers. Getting in will problematic. Getting out again seems unlikely.

Still, Riley intends to try, in large part because his reputation demands it. Prescott isn't taking any chances, though—he has a couple of hostages to ensure Wolfe's compliance.

With most capers, readers will assume that the protagonist will ultimately be successful, albeit after setbacks that make it look like he will surely fail. In this case, failure means more than just coming up empty-handed. Lives are at stake, including Wolfe's. If he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he will be tortured and killed. Even with successful capers, there's usually a cost. There are varying degrees of success.

Wolfe's capers are particularly ingenious, on the level of that old crime series Banacek, where something seems impossible, and yet it really did happen. How, for instance, can Wolfe steal a heavily guarded Russian religious icon during broad daylight and get it out of the country? This is just the first stage of an elaborate scheme Wolfe concocts to retrieve the data, get some extra booty for himself and gain the freedom of the hostages.

Regular characters from the previous Wolfe novels reappear in this entry in the series. Frank Delgado, the FBI agent whose personal mission is to track down and capture Wolfe, by one of those happenstances that occurs in these books, finds himself SAIC in the Moscow bureau when Wolfe robs the museum in that city. Master forger Monique, the woman Wolfe wants but can never get, was left in difficult circumstances at the end of Fool Me Twice and goes through an interesting experience at the hands of Prescott's minions.

Wolfe shares one trait with Lindsay's previous literary creation, Dexter Morgan: both feel that bad people deserve to die. In Wolfe's case, he rarely sets out to kill people, but if they end up as collateral damage, he doesn't lose any sleep over it. His flippancy, self-aggrandizement and amorality make him a challenging character to like, but readers will be swept along by the ingenuity of Wolfe's capers.