Jack is a career criminal, or more specifically, a “ghostman,” who’s helped maybe a hundred bank robbers escape over the years. Hobbs - who graduated in 2011 from Reed College - seizes our attention and holds it tight, not so much through his plotting or his characters but through his sheer, masterly use of details, and the authoritative, hard-boiled voice he has fashioned for Jack.

The same might well be said of Roger Hobbs, the author of this debut crime novel.

“Wheelmen think differently from normal people,” says the novel’s narrator, known as Jack, who’s no slouch himself when it comes to details. Their partnership-between people with no lasting relationships whatsoever-is at the very heart of a novel that will cement Roger Hobbs’s status as one of our most talented crime writers.A crucial clue in this smoking-fast new thriller is turned up by a “wheelman” - or car expert - who takes a BlackBerry photo of some muddy car tracks and using only his memory and an Internet connection is able to identify the tires that made those tread marks with 90 percent certainty in 10 minutes. Though the two haven’t talked since they botched a job six years ago, as soon as Jack’s off the plane they’re back together again, facing down a crime boss, a hit man and a conspiracy bigger than anything they’ve ever encountered and more dangerous than they could’ve imagined. Jack has no real name, no address and no fingerprints-but given the right motivation, he can make serious problems vanish. Within hours he’s flying halfway around the world to find her in the glimmering neon slums of Macau. She calls in a favor from her onetime protégé: a fixer sometimes known as Jack, or more often as simply the Ghostman. His boss, Angela, isn’t about to let that happen. He’ll have the power to change the course of history. If he disappears, he won’t just be wealthy. Within minutes two of them are dead, leaving the third, a coldblooded psychopath, to claim both the sapphires and the mysterious windfall for himself.

But when one of them stumbles across an enormous treasure that wasn’t on the manifest, everything goes sideways. Their target: a bag of uncut sapphires worth millions. It’s just before dawn on the South China Sea when three experienced pirates open fire on a small smuggling yacht.

The gritty, riveting, highly anticipated sequel to the national (and international) best seller Ghostman, by the critically acclaimed and award-winning Roger Hobbs

Ghostman by Roger Hobbs