Mute getaway driver Patrick Lennon thought it was a routine bank job until the black van rammed them and everything went to hell. Amidst a maze of murder and double crosses, can Lennon recover the $650,000?Wow. I'd been aware of this book for a couple years before I finally picked it up and now I'm kicking myself for waiting so long.The Wheelman has more twists and double crosses packed within its slim 250-ish pages than any four other crime books on the racks. More twists than a snake trapped o...

"Then the alarm went off, and everything went to hell." -- page 4There's nothing I love better than chancing upon a hidden gem at a used book sale, especially when the event is in support of a community library. The Wheelman, the sophomore novel of author Duane Swierczynski, is one of those books that I knew absolutely nothing about upon purchase. However, it's one of those stories that pulls you in right away - in the opening the reader is practically sitting alongside a professional heist driv...

I'm still trying to comb my hair back down and brush the grit out of my teeth after jumping in the passenger side with "the wheelman" Lennon. The plot snaps along at a breakneck pace setting I'm sure the world record for the most double dealing, double crosses in the history of literature. The prose is muscular, the dialogue is crisp, the plot is intriguing and all of this unfolds in 231 pages. A very impressive debut novel, I will definitely be picking up more books by Duane Swierczynski which

I've made a habit of downrating books that rely too heavily on violence, on explicit gore and on foul language. But I feel it would be disingenuous to claim I didn't enjoy the journey in the company of Pat Lennon - a getaway driver in a bank robbery gang. I read the book practically in one sitting, morning to mid-afternoon, compulsively turning the pages and rushing to find out what crazy twist of fate, what terrible doublecross will fall into the lap of the fortune challenged Irish born gangste...

This fast-paced debut novel opens outside of a bank in Philadelphia where Lennon, an apparently mute Irishman, is waiting patiently for the rest of his team. Lennon is not a bank robber exactly, but for a share of the take, he drives bank robbers to and from the job. This particular job has been carefully planned and Lennon knows his exit route down to the last inch. But at the last possible second, the heist goes sour and the proverbial excrement hits the fan. Lennon finds himself betrayed, lef...

Man, this took me a while to finish. It certainly had nothing to do with the plot, the characters or the author’s pacing; I just picked the wrong times to read. Almost every time I picked this book up, I dozed off. What had made this experience so frustrating was that I really liked it and I would find myself getting angry and wondering if I was suffering from narcolepsy. Trust me, if you’re unable to find a story about a mute, Irish getaway driver at least a little interesting, there may be som...

A bank heist goes wrong and professional getaway driver Patrick Lennon wakes from unconsciousness inside a body bag to find himself about to be shoved down a pipe which will soon be filled with concrete as part of a community project for Philadelphia kids. Battered and bleeding, Patrick sets out to discover who ratted on him and where the stolen bank money - all 65o thousand dollars of it - has gone. From the start, you know this tale will not have a happy ending. Along the way he encounters cor...

The Wheelman is a post modern black comic take on the classic caper gone wrong. Alongside Allan Guthrie and Charlie Huston here is another writer of no holds barred, punk rock neo-pulp. Duane Swierczynski. comes off more knowing than Guthrie with a fiercely modern sensibility. This book is all pure bravado storytelling with twists, complications, betrayals, endless new characters, death at every turn (what was the body count?), and lots of surprises (try to guess who makes it, you might be wrong...

Yowza! What a ride!This book has twists and turns and nasty sudden stops.Look out for that windshield!It's the kind of book where things go from bad to worse,just when you think they can't possibly get any worse.Impossible to put down? Yeah.It's the kind of book that can lead a devoted mother to snarl at her youngest son,"I don't care if the cat IS on fire! Can't you see Mommy is READING!!!"

The fiction debut of Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman borrows from his previous non-fiction endeavour about bank robbers and pre-empts his fast paced adrenaline rush style that would become his trademark. There's this guy, not quite Ryan Gosling, he drives getaway cars for bank robbers, he doesn't talk, he doesn't wave guns, he just drives. For 240 pages he is put through the physical and mental wringer in the aftermath of a Philadelphia heist gone south.For a debut novel this is excellent work;...

*3.5/5 This book was incredibly fast-paced and definitely offered the vibe of the high risk criminal getting involved in the mafia's business that I was looking for. The world was vibrant and complex and I even really liked the main character. Unfortunately, the ending was a bit lackluster and some of the big twists fell slightly flat for me. If not for the ending, I definitely would have given this book a 4 stars. Entertaining overall, but lacking a little extra something to make it great.

4.5 What a fantastic cluster-fuck of a heist gone wrong novel.

*4.5 Stars*When it comes to big loads of money, trust nobody!I probably wouldn't last very long as a career criminal. I probably would be on edge the whole time and would blow everyone away because I wouldn't be able to trust that any of my partners would be loyal. If I tried to pull a heist, the outcome might look a bit like this fun novel about a mute getaway driver during the most disastrous heist of his career. Lennon and his partners make their getaway from a $650K bank heist, but immediate...

Lennon is an accomplished wheelman. Escaping by the skin of his teeth from a successful bank job, Lennon wants to avoid causing injury to any bystanders, but while leaving the bank in a hurry, a woman pushing a stroller walks in his path. Braking and wrestling with the wheel was out of the question. The risk of fishtailing was too great, and Lennon worried that he would broadside both the lady and the stroller. Steering clear out of the way was impossible. Immediately to the right of the woman a...

The Wheelman is Stark (any Parker caper) meets Vachss (‘The Getaway Man’) in a fusion by which all heist novels should be measured henceforth. The protagonist, mute getaway drive Patrick Lennon is instantly likable showing compassion, loyalty and willingness to participate in violence only as a last resort. For a guy who claims to be nonviolent, a hell of a lot of people are caused a great deal of grief at the hands (or instruments wielded by said hands) of Lennon – all justified of course. The

Duane Swierczynski The Wheelman (2005) A while back I read Duane Swierczynski’s non-fiction book on American bank robberies and robbers, This Here’s A Stick-Up (2002). So clearly he brings a certain authority to this novel centered around a bank robbery in Philadelphia. He isn’t shy about reminding us of his knowledge, and after awhile I found the intermittent chapters with quotes from real bank robbers a bit annoying. I get it, he’s qualified, but I suppose some will enjoy the quotes from Mach...

Dear Mr Swierczynski:I hate you for being such a good author. By hate, I mean envy, and by author I mean sheer awesome dude. So, to recap, I envy you for being a sheer awesome dude.I read The Wheelman over a couple day span on the local transit system. It was less polished than your later novels such as Severance Package or The Blonde. It is weird to describe pulpy books as polished, but I am sure you are picking up what I am putting down.I know it is your book and as such, you already know the

Lennon, an Irish immigrant, is a get-away driver, who with two associates robs a bank in Philadelphia’s Center City. All goes well, until they are rammed by unknown assailants on their way to the airport to make their escape. Lennon regains consciousness in a garbage bag & is stuffed into a pipe at a construction site, apparently along with his cohorts. Lennon manages to not only survive, but escape. But where is their haul from the robbery? Left inside a car in a long-stay car-park, the money

I had the privilege of reading Duane Swierczynski's THIS HERE'S A STICK-UP, his non-fiction tome of bank robbery facts and figures, a few years back when it first came out. In THE WHEELMAN, Mr. Swierczynski takes fact, mixes it up with a whole lot of fiction, and comes up with a thrilling crime debut that's well worth the read! We first meet Lennon, a wheelman or get-away driver, waiting outside a Wachovia bank in Philadelphia as his two associates, Bling and Holden, get caught on their way out

4.5 stars..The title caught my attention and then when Duane Swierczynski's name kept popping-up in most the places I surf the internet (Mainly over at www.fantasyLiterature.com where I'm a reviewer and his book Expiration Date was reviewed), I snatched it up as soon as the copyrights allowed for the USA Amazon Kindle publication.I thought it was going to be a story about fast cars and robbing banks, but it's not that exactly. It's about a really good getaway driver, who has a long string of bad...