Abigail Barnes is young, pretty and petite, but her looks and size can be deceiving. She’s a tough as nails drifter who makes her living collecting outstanding debts for low-end bookies and loan sharks, Abigail arrives in Hackensack, NJ, from Baltimore, MD, and gets a job collecting for a small-time bookie, who winds up dead.

With a large Wall Street firm moving into town bringing jobs, prestige, and money, the press is soon up in arms about the killing. So the cops to put the squeeze on Ronnie “Slacks” Falcone, a mobster who heads organized crime in the Jersey City area, to help find the killer.

Soon Abigail finds herself being sought by a gang of hoodlums, the mob, and the police. She knows she can’t run and she won’t turn herself in because she has a past that could send her to jail. She has little choice but to try and find out who killed the bookie – without getting killed in the process.

Every action novel needs a dramatic opening. The first chapter of The Debt Collector has one of the best and most gripping that I have read for a while. This is the start of the relationship between Abigail and Hector which I thought was going to become the new “Bonnie and Clyde” but I was never good at predicting plots.

In Abigail Barnes, Steven Max Russo has created a fascinating action character who successfully recovers debts from the toughest of debtors. Her methods are a long way from those I studied for my Credit Control exams a few years ago. There’s nothing altruistic in her work, she collects from one shady person to repay another shady person, ensuring that she takes a substantial commission for herself.

The author writes in a fairly simple, easy to read style. During my lifetime the rules of English grammar have become more relaxed but one that I still try to follow is to avoid using more than one “and” in each sentence. Steven Max Russo clearly does not follow such a rule as I found myself actually checking such sentences; noting one with seven “and”s, another with eight.

Generally the plot was easy to follow. Whilst I found Abigail interesting I wanted to know more about Hector. We learned little detail about the remaining protagonists and at times I confused some of the peripheral characters. I felt that the action slowed midway with reflections of the situation from various aspects but the story came to a climax with a dramatic denouement.

I’ve read that Steven Max Russo is an advertising copywriter and agency owner from New Jersey who writes in his spare time. If The Debt Collector is representative of his work he has found a successful and potentially lucrative hobby.

Russo has suggested that a sequel is on its way, indeed the Epilogue of The Debt Collector reads as the first chapter of a new book. As for my anticipation of the new Bonnie and Clyde, maybe I was right after all.

Read The Debt Collector for yourself to see what I mean. I have awarded it four stars.