The Nightworkers by Brian Selfon Review

Emil is a talented up-and-coming Brooklyn artist but perennially broke. So when he meets Henry, another wannabe artist, and is offered a gig being a runner for money laundering, he decides that’s an easier way of making cash instead of slinging baggies of dope - until he suddenly disappears along with a quarter million in cash. Henry and his small crime family have to figure out what happened and where the cash has gone before the money’s owners come looking for it…

Brian Selfon’s debut novel The Nightworkers is really two and a half stories, only one of which is half-decent. The half-decent story starts well - Emil and Henry’s new friendship, it develops nicely, there’s the twist. The problem is that the start of the book is the peak - everything afterwards is downhill.

The second story is about Kerasha, a troubled young woman on parole with a heroin addiction. We learn about her horrible childhood, junkie mother, and weird, burgeoning obsession with her shrink, Dr Xu - only none of it matters. You could excise Kerry’s entire story and it wouldn’t affect the main narrative of the missing money and the trouble surrounding it. It’s not very interesting to read in itself, it pointlessly distracts and only makes the novel overlong.

The half story is about Officer Montenegro, a victim of human trafficking turned cop/fighter of human trafficking. Like Kerry’s story, Montenegro’s could easily be cut as it hasn’t got any relevance to anything, is grimly dull and pads out the novel still further without adding much besides pages.

I liked the character of Uncle Shecky, who’s a sort of modern-day Fagin with a heart, and Henry was interesting for the most part as he’s something of a livewire with a chip on his shoulder. Then add his upset feelings at Emil and he becomes this unpredictable Tazmanian devil so there was always an element of tension wherever he went. The novel was mostly well-written and there were a number of moments in the main narrative that were genuinely gripping to read.

Selfon’s got a lot of potential as a crime novelist and might write a great novel one day but The Nightworkers isn’t that great novel - it’s too unfocused and messy, lacking anything substantial to sink your teeth into to be satisfying. If he had cut Kerry and Montenegro’s stuff and stuck with and dug deeper into Henry/Emil/Shecky’s narrative, this would be a strong novella, but, as it is, it’s too long by half and made dreary and boring for it. A weak debut.