Nolan is part of a mini-ensemble which includes an antique dealer in Iowa City (“Planner”) who finds possible scores for thieves like Nolan and his nephew Jon, a comic-book fan who reads, collects, and aspires to both sell and write them. Since these kinds of things never play out as promised we need the second novel for Nolan to put things right again. The brother has now putatively mellowed and is prepared to let bygones be bygones if and only if Nolan risks his liberty by pulling off one last heist and handing over 100K to the aggrieved surviving brother. When he declined he fell afoul of the brother of a higher-up by murdering the relative and absconding with some serious mob coin.

He had earlier been asked to take on a muscle job that would first entail killing a friend. The subject is ageing (late 40’s!) Nolan’s desire to get right with the Chicago mob and, in semi-retirement, run a motel/restaurant. That ending has been changed and the two novels now fit together more or less seamlessly. BAIT MONEY had a different ending in its first incarnation.

BAIT MONEY is actually MAC’s first published novel BLOOD MONEY (as he explains in a helpful Afterword) was written a couple years later. “Two for the Money” is the new title for two novels (BAIT MONEY/BLOOD MONEY) in that series. Once again we are in debt to HardCaseCrime for reprinting MAC’s Nolan series. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.

Two for the Money by Max Allan Collins