The Moth
The Moth is a wry noir novel in which an everyman with a complicated past navigates criminality and its consequences in Los Angeles.
A pawnbroker on the criminal fringes encounters trouble in Scott Archer Jones’s entertaining novel The Moth.
In 2010, Frank is a middle-aged pawnbroker known as the Moth in gritty East Los Angeles. His shop is a front for fake identification cards, weapons, and crime-related tools, though his scruples prevent him from selling to minors or from helping people commit home invasions. He’s also a police informant and helps women in distress. When the Russian mafia seeks revenge for a death caused by one of his gun sales, he’s faced with a harsh choice.
In this rearward-gazing character study, Frank’s past is explored to explain how he became the Moth and developed his murky morals. Raised by a Lithuanian Catholic mother after his father, a drunken philanderer, died in an accident, he wound up repaying his parents’ debts. Frank’s memories are primal and integral to understanding him: Early on, his father taught him that “the sin isn’t in the doing” but in being caught. His hardships molded him into a streetwise man, quick to bend social rules to his benefit. From stealing groceries for a homeless family to fudging finances at work, Frank embodies misguided opportunism; he is sometimes kind, but he also hides dead bodies when he views it as justice.
Each chapter is labeled with a year and a theme, a novel-in-stories format that is used to develop Frank as an imperfect blend of everyman, part-time altruist, and dubious middleman. The overarching plot is quite loose, though, and the book’s colorful, episodic approach results in sketched-in characters, including among Frank’s clientele and passersby. Further, its incidents remain somewhat isolated from one another, and a few events strain credulity, including Frank’s decision to help assassinate an exiled African despot.
A story about a woman’s murder exists in stark juxtaposition to the bulk of the sketches, which remain light even while dealing with criminal activities. Her death is transformational for Frank, who becomes involved with a police detective and is more calculating in its wake. The conflict surrounding the Russian mob is unresolved at the novel’s ambiguous ending. Frank contemplates running away, and the audience is denied a sense of finality.
In the adventure-filled novel The Moth, an eccentric man runs a pawnshop and has daring criminal escapades on the side.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
