Let’s be honest: you read this book for the crimes, and the crimes, dear reader, are pretty great. Exotic, high energy, yet methodical. If you loved the movie you might like this. The writing is clunky at times and the primary villain seems almost unnaturally lucky. The context and backstory for the original film characters are well crafted. The love stories kinda work but not really, imho.

My number one gripe is this: the right medium for this story is visual, not textual. The book is filled with specific positions and layouts and scene blocking that refer to very specific spatial positions and visualizing them to understand the flow can feel very clumsy. It’s the old “dancing about architecture” problem. I guess he just realized the actors were too old and a direct prequel wasn’t realistic, so he tried to do the next best thing. I’m glad I read it. I won’t be re-reading.