Relying on his own experience as an assistant U.S. attorney, Higgins pulls back the veneer on the real criminal underworld, not the romanticized version readers kept in their heads before The Friends of Eddie Coyle was published. There are no noble gangsters swept up in high tragedy in Higgins’s world and no righteous cops obsessed with justice. There are only guys punching a clock, day in and day out; for some the job is to rob, to kidnap, or, in the case of Dillon, to kill. For others, the job is to arrest or prosecute. They’re working stiffs, essentially, and no one gets too hot and
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