LOSERS GALLERY

4.5

LOSERS GALLERY – Robert Klayman is out of prison after doing time for gunplay on his last P.I. job. Blacklisted and broke, he falls in with a gangster and travels to Odessa, Ukraine, to move stolen art out of the country under the eyes of the Russian mob. Sought out by thugs on both sides of the world, Klayman takes on the laws of the jungle when he finds himself a pawn in his employer’s murderous scheme.

Buy Now

What People Say

Robert Klayman is a Californian private eye in G. J. Prager’s mystery thriller Losers Gallery tasked with smuggling a stolen Rembrandt from Ukraine for a shady oligarch. As you can imagine, things quickly go south leaving Klayman to suss out just what went wrong and why while enacting his own revenge. Readers come to know Klayman, out on parole for not having a proper PI license and shooting someone with an unregistered weapon, through Prager’s short chapters effortlessly distilled moving the story along with a steady pace that slowly entices.

Desperate for work (thus his entanglement) but not a push over, Klayman isn’t the kind of hero most would expect. He’s dodgy, less than noble but definitely guided by a sense of justice many readers will find appealing. Since the story takes readers from the bright land of California to lawless Bogota, Colombia to the grim, monochrome of Ukraine, Klayman certainly feels like the perfect fit in each land—shady, but driven. He discovers around him a quality of menace where “A smiling face…might raise suspicions of historical ignorance and unwarranted optimism.” It is grim yet addictive.

Prager’s real gift is in how his prose seems to effortlessly inhabit and reveal his protagonist’s mental state. We get internal conflicts as deep as the external action is as complicated. As with any noir thriller, there is a steady flow of twists, misinformation, and hidden clues readers of the genre will feel very satisfied with. While there may be some rather simple caricatures in terms of femme fatales and dimwitted police, overall Prager’s Klayman makes for an engaging figure. Losers Gallery is an astonishing collection of schemes where Klayman navigates the madness as best he can. For lovers of the genre, there is definitely a sense of multiple factions all competing with each other but the ultimate resolution is deceptively simple (as in most of the best thrillers). Piecing together motivations and machinations, readers will find themselves lost in the story as they shadow Prager’s protagonist.

As Prager’s most recent installment in his ongoing series centered on Klayman, readers of the genre looking for a new authorial voice and detective will be quite happy with what they get here in Losers Gallery.

Reviewed by Daniel Casey LOSERS GALLERY by G.J. Prager