In Dietrich Kalteis’s crime thriller The Get, it’s the mid-1960s and Lenny Ovitz has his hands more than full. Lenny’s boss, short-fused Ernie Zimm, runs a protection racket fronted by a travel agency in Toronto’s Kensington Market, and Lenny and his partner Gabe are his collectors, sent out each day to terrorize local shopkeepers into coughing up the dough. But Lenny’s growing nervous. A while back he let Gabe talk him into an ill-advised real estate purchase. To make the deal happen they had to borrow money from a brutal loan shark. But the buildings they bought are derelict and require major repairs. A return on his money is years away, and Lenny’s facing pressure to start repaying the loan now. His only chance to make good is to re-mortgage his house, but how does he manage that without tipping off his wife Paulina, who knows nothing about the loan? To make matters worse, Gabe is out of control, having been picked up by the cops after killing two people while out collecting for Ernie. Word on the street is that in custody Gabe has turned rat, telling the cops everything he knows about Ernie’s operation. On the home front Lenny’s got more to worry about. Fed up with his secrets and lies, Paulina has kicked him out of the house and is demanding a divorce. Lenny needs to cash in on the value of their property but he’s afraid that in a divorce Paulina will take everything, leaving him high and dry. He needs her out of the way, permanently. The Get—unpretentious, seamlessly plotted, dripping with atmosphere—never pretends to be anything other than what it is. Kalteis writes a nothing-fancy brand of hard-boiled fiction that moves at breakneck speed and doesn’t indulge in sentiment. Amidst the action there are plenty of laughs as Lenny—no criminal mastermind—tries to scheme his way out of the mess he’s got himself into. In the end, the narrative threads converge and everyone gets what’s coming to them. The Get is sure fire entertainment for fans of high-octane crime fiction from an author who knows how to get the job done. ( )