It’s 1980, a few days before the presidential election and already it looks like the incoming Reagan will beat the exhausted Carter. Vince Camden wonders who he should vote for. He’s never had occasion to vote in the past because he used to be a felon, and felons are denied the right to vote.

He used to be a lot of things: a New Yorker, a con-man, the fiancé of a beautiful woman, and the future brother-in-law of a lawyer. (It’s good to have a lawyer in the family when you live on the wrong side of the law.) He used to have another name besides Vince. But then he had the bad luck to get caught by the feds and forced to testify against the mob. That necessitated disappearing into the Witness Protection Program. For the past few years, Vince has been living in boring Spokane, Washington.

Not much presents itself as entertainment in Spokane. Vince can join all-night poker games at Sam’s Pit, a club where Spokane’s five or six criminals hang out. (This is where he visits his sort-of girlfriend Beth, a hooker who claims to be studying for her real-estate license.) He can drop in on the federal courthouse and play chess with the U.S. Marshall assigned to his case. He can work at his job, managing a doughnut shop named Donut Make You Hungry and supervising his one employee Tic, a kid who can’t stop talking about conspiracy theories.

And he can do what you might expect him to do: continue to run a credit-card scam that he recently started with a small crew of men. Vince has already made thousands of dollars through this con, which he stashes in the doughnut shop basement. He works with a mailman Clay whose identity he keeps hidden from his middleman Len and his forger Doug.

But crime does not pay! A new guy Ray comes to town and gets acquainted with Len. Ray hears about the credit card scam, and decides he should take over. All he and Len have to do is force Vince to tell them the crucial information: the name of the mailman to work with so that they can continue the scam without Vince. While they’re at it, they might as well take all of Vince’s stockpiled money.

Ray and Len visit the forger Doug at his little photography shop late at night to recruit him into their plan. But Doug gets cold feet, so psycho Ray shoots him. This drags in the Spokane cops who cordon off the strip mall to puzzle through the crime scene. Vince, who is out walking late at night, stumbles across the scene by chance. A rookie cop named Dupree engages him in conversation and asks him a few "casual" questions.

This kicks off a ferocious plot in which Vince, assuming that Ray is a hit-man out to get him, journeys back to New York City to look up the old mobsters from his past and try to make a deal. Dupree, who intuitively knows that Vince is more than he seems, follows him to New York City as part of the ongoing murder investigation. Poor Dupree, when paired up with a psychopathic and corrupt NYPD detective, starts his own nightmarish adventure.

Citizen Vince is fast-moving, harrowing, and often wildly funny, and features two great characters in the philosophical Vince and the dogged Dupree. This Edgar Award winner can be found on Amazon through this link: Citizen Vince: A Novel