Thief of Thieves vol. 3: Venice

I don’t know if co-writers Robert Kirkman and Andy Diggle realized that master thief Conrad Paulson’s son Augustus was the biggest drag on the proceedings of the last volume, but it sure reads like they’re trying to make amends for it here.  After an opening where cartel ringleader Lola tells Conrad that he wants ten million dollars to make amends for his son’s screw-ups, Augustus is promptly stripped naked, thrown in a trailer truck, and spends the rest of the volume suffering a number of indignities.  Some might say that the writers go too far with it based on what little we see of said indignities.  After vol. 2, I say that Augustus deserves pretty much everything he gets here.  The best part about all this is that the character is out of the way of the main story for this volume and we get to focus on Conrad’s efforts to rip off the Italian mafia.

Or is it just “The Mafia” since most of the story takes place in Italy?  Anyway, with the huge payday necessary to pacify Lola, Conrad has no choice but to go back to his old boss Arno to tell him that he’s ready to undertake the Venice Job that was mentioned in the first volume.  You know, the job that the thief was supposed to undertake before his sudden “retirement.”  Now with his son’s life on the line, Conrad gets his old crew back together and flies out to Italy with them to undertake a job that will either make them all very, very rich or very, very dead.  The stakes for this job are so high that Conrad even brings his ex-wife Audrey in on the action… which turns out to be a mistake as she drunkenly blabs some key details of it to FBI Agent Liz Cohen.  Now that she has a stake in the game, Agent Cohen is also on her way to Venice to put her nemesis away for good.

This volume of “Thief of Thieves” has two main issues.  One is that things take a while to get going.  There’s a lot of setup going on here with Conrad having to make the rounds to some of the key players in the plot, Agent Cohen getting in nice with the Venice Police, and introducing us to the head of the Mafia, Don Parrino.  It’s all handled capably enough and perceptive readers will likely be able to spot the things being foreshadowed for twists later on in the story.  The other issue is that even though Conrad has a fairly large and visibly diverse crew we don’t get to learn anything about them.  They’re all ciphers defined by their roles — pilot, driver, disguise artist, hacker — who are only present because the plot demands someone with their particular skillset.

As the book isn’t an ensemble piece, one gets to thinking that Kirkman would’ve been better off having Conrad be adept at these skills himself.  Yes, that may have been stretching plausibility but you can also see how it would’ve added to his legend as a master thief.  Keep Celia onboard as his right hand/apprentice and the pages involving the crew in this volume could’ve been better spent fleshing out the existing cast members.  However, given that this is the setup they’ve chosen to go with Kirkman and company are now stuck with developing these characters lest they continue to function as personality-free plot devices.  This series has already been licensed for development as a TV series, so it would be particularly disappointing if the show winds up giving us a better-developed crew and trumping its source material in that regard.

Once we get to the book’s second half, then all this becomes much less of a problem.  We get to see the results of all that setup as the bullets start flying, the body count starts piling up, and Conrad shows us just how far ahead of everyone else he was in the plotting.  It’s the kind of fast-paced action story that co-writer Diggle specializes in and it captures a lot of the excitement and fun that was present in the first volume but missing from the second.  There are also some clever twists in the last few pages that play well of what has come before and set up some interesting avenues to explore in the next volume.

As with the first two volumes, Shawn Martinbrough provides the art, and his work remains as smooth and expressive as always.  Really, after the second volume proved to be a somewhat underwhelming detour “Venice” sees things get back on track.  It also bodes well for the fact that future solicitations indicate that Diggle is now the sole writer on the book.  What happened to the “writer’s room” approach that was hyped when Kirkman announced the book?  Who knows, though what we get here indicates that “Thief of Thieves” is in good hands going forward.