Tara Evans has been robbing banks in partnership with her father since she was nine years old. (Child labor laws evidently do not apply in the bank-robbing industry.) At the ripe old age of 22, she now has thirteen years apprenticeship under her belt. That level of experience would look good on anyone's resume. But lately dear old Dad is beginning to wear on Tara's nerves. In the course of their recent hold-ups he's been blowing away an increasing number of innocent bystanders, and he seems to be taking more than passing relish in the killings. Tara is losing patience with her father's rapidly escalating level of violence.

Additionally, she is beginning to feel stirrings inside herself...stirrings connected with the condition of being 22 years of age and never having had a satisfactory lover. Along comes Max Williams, son of a small town sheriff. At 21, Max is more than ready to fly the coop and single-handedly take on the world, and he curiously lacks his father's rigid sense of law and order. So when Max and Tara meet, all of the expected sparks fly. They hit the road for California, and their ensuing adventures, if not strictly legal, are entertaining -- and given Max and Tara's somewhat skewed morality, are probably a perfectly natural way for the starry-eyed lovers to blow off their youthful steam.

Unfortunately, Tara's daddy, Wyatt, is insanely jealous of any man in Tara's life and dogs the pair in close, manic pursuit. At the same time, the FBI is zeroing in on Wyatt. The extended chase that follows, frantic and seldom linear, comprises the best part of the story.

47 Rules of Highly Effective Bank Robbers is based on a cleverly cynical premise, and from the first page to the last the story never bogs down. There is just enough tension to keep the reader interested, and just enough humor to keep us from getting morbid. Best of all, the book is peopled with the sort of wonderfully eccentric characters that can only be drawn from real life: the would-be Elvis impersonator, the supercilious FBI agent, the half-crazed Vietnam vet who has dug a series of escape tunnels under his desert home, and the calmly efficient Navajo tracker. (Okay, I'll admit it rankled me just a bit that the tracker was saddled with a name like Running Bear. Having lived most of my life in the American Southwest, I have known Navajos with names such as Joseph Begay and Wendall Yazee and Lawrence Chee, but I have never heard of a Running Bear anywhere on the rez. But I quibble.)

47 Rules is a fabulous first novel from Troy Cook, and I, for one, will be watching for more from this author. I would recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed the work of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, or the Grand Master, John D. MacDonald.