Beating the Game

A velvet-gloved cracksman, Fancy Charlie, slips through midnight’s keyhole into the book-lined sanctum of criminologist G.B. Lawson, expecting loot and finding instead a mirror. Mistaking the scholar’s cabinets of larceny lore for the trove of a rival yegg, Charlie—out of peer etiquette—admits the burglary. Lawson, amused by this courteous predator, proposes a wager steeped in inverted morality: take a stake, go straight in the postcard hamlet of Plumfield, and prove that the largest score is the one never stolen. Charlie accepts, trading jimmied tumblers for ledgers, nitroglycerin for nickel-coke sodas, yet the town’s picket-fence façade soon reveals its own combination lock of graft, hypocrisy, and restless hearts. Over twelve brisk chapters of conscience, Charlie confronts crooked aldermen, a love as unexpected as a fingerprint on glass, and the vertiginous suspicion that perhaps the house always wins—only the house is now his own general store. When the year expires, the final cut is not of loot but of identity, measured less in banknotes than in the silence after a bell that no longer needs to be rung.