{"id":10596,"date":"2023-09-11T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-11T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10596"},"modified":"2023-09-10T10:32:29","modified_gmt":"2023-09-10T14:32:29","slug":"like-printing-money-by-r-a-cramblitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10596","title":{"rendered":"Like Printing Money by R.A. Cramblitt"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You may have a pretty good guess what the wonks working after hours at 3D printing company 3Make are up to\u2014after all, only a few activities are likely to be Like Printing Money<\/em>, the name of RA Cramblitt\u2019s new technological crime novel. But, don\u2019t worry, the technology isn\u2019t so dense that it obscures the basic human motivation at work here\u2014greed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set in Baltimore, Maryland, the story does evoke the city\u2019s row houses and freeways and the backwoods countryside that\u2019s not really that far away. Baltimore is coming into its own as a location for crime stories, building on the success of author Laura Lippman and the television series, Homicide: Life on the Streets<\/em> and The Wire<\/em>. It\u2019s definitely a city, it has distinct neighborhoods, but it\u2019s not so big as to be fictionally unmanageable\u2014it doesn\u2019t take three hours to drive across town, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An interesting set of characters, Black and white, negotiate Cramblitt\u2019s city streets, and you can be forgiven for not spotting who the star of the show is going to be. At first you may think it\u2019s Bernard Jamal, college hoops player and successful venture capitalist, who\u2019s kidnapped in the first chapter, his long legs folded into the uncomfortable confines of an automobile trunk. In fact, however, the story\u2019s main character is Charlaine Pennington, an investigator in a private detective agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlaine is working on a case assigned to her by the detective agency owner, Tony Mancuso. It involves 3Make in some way, but she\u2019s received precious little information about what the job entails. She doesn\u2019t like it and objects, and if there\u2019s one thing Charlaine is good at\u2014several things, actually\u2014it\u2019s sticking up for herself. It turns out that Tony himself doesn\u2019t know as much as he\u2019d like to about why the sketchy Russian has hired them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something is very wrong at 3Make, and Charlaine and Tony are determined to find out what that is, even before they find the first body. And Jamal may have escaped his captors, but he hasn\u2019t shed his desire to find out who they were and what they were up to. I loved the charming elderly Black man who helps him. Great character!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cramblitt has a habit of overloading the narrative with back story. He\u2019s good at showing, and I for one could do with a lot less telling. I like to see a novel\u2019s characters in action and figure out their strengths and weaknesses for myself. Like Printing Money<\/em> is Cramblitt\u2019s first crime novel, though, and he may realize he doesn\u2019t need all that history. The narrative screeches to a stop every time. You can certainly hope there aren\u2019t any technological wizards like 3Make\u2019s Barrett and Chen, working after hours on projects akin to the one exposed in this novel, but the sad truth is, there undoubtedly are. The book gives you fair warning.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have a pretty good guess what the wonks working after hours at 3D printing company 3Make are up to\u2014after all, only a few activities are likely to be Like Printing Money, the name of RA Cramblitt\u2019s new technological … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Don't you suspect some guys out there are already beavering away at this? Something to think about! Lively thriller.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[54,126,186],"tags":[2105,2116],"class_list":["post-10596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-detective","category-reading-2","category-technology","tag-baltimore","tag-counterfeiting"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2KU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10598,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10596\/revisions\/10598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}