Jake Ahn, the Korean American star of this immensely entertaining novel, is a thief, burglar, and safecracker— in short, the sort of charismatic scoundrel one would meet in a Hitchcock movie. But Jake hates talk like that. ‘ Reality is brutal,’ he says, and demonstrates.  Jake shoots his former partner, Bobby Null, after the latter betrays him in Seattle, and runs off to San Francisco (with a backpack containing $8,755 in cash) to hide with his brother, Eugene, with whom he’s had a rocky relationship dating back to childhood. Here’s where Chang carefully darkens his story without compromising the relentless plotting. Jake’s brother is a disaster in his job and his marriage, and his desirable wife hooks up, in all senses, with Jake. As Jake’s sad brother is catching on, the mentally unstable Bobby luckily survives the bullet in his gut and embarks on a quest for revenge. The result is a violent convergence of events…