If you like action -- and gun fights, profanity, alcohol and drug abuse, black humor, torture and a cat with a broken leg don't bother you -- Charlie Huston's Caught Stealing is your book.

Hank Thompson is a thirtysomething ex-Californian with a checkered past biding his time tending bar and turning himself into an alcoholic in a gin mill in Manhattan's Lower East Side. A neighbor asks him to babysit his cat and Hank agrees. Then all hell breaks loose.

Before he knows it, he's on the run, stitched up and missing a kidney, pursued by both a gang led by a dirty cop and two demented brothers, all of whom want a key taped inside the cat's travel box, which is a ticket to millions in cash.

As the bodies pile up and Hank makes one narrow escape after another, he manages to find time to call his parents in California to assure them he is OK, take care of the cat and follow the progress of his beloved Giants on various newspapers and TV sets he encounters.

Huston's dialogue-writing is impressive. Each character has his own voice.

I can't wait to get to the other two books in the trilogy.