The Adjustment by Scott Phillips (The Ice Harvest), picked up by Counterpoint after Phoenix Books went out of business, is a noirish tale of a petty criminal plying his trade in Wichita after World War II. Wayne Ogden (we met him briefly in Phillips's The Walkaway) is now out of the army and needs a little adjusting from all the crimes he committed in Europe. He works for the rich owner of Collins Aircraft, a warped man he despises, doing everything nefarious and dirty the old man asks of him.
We first meet Ogden cleaning up another Collins mess--he's driving a young woman to St. Louis to have an abortion. Ogden seems a reasonable sort but he quickly reveals himself to be a self-centered, smart-ass jerk, ready to bed any woman he meets (he's married with his first kid on the way) and beat or kill anyone he dislikes, fulfilled in a perverse sort of way by his sordid and dull existence.
Ogden tells his own story in a dry, distracted, I-couldn't-care-less tone, which makes all his violent actions seem ordinary. The monologue is delivered in short, choppy sections, giving the book a quick, bang-bang narrative pace, with some tension created by a subplot about Ogden receiving unsigned, accusatory letters from an apparently wronged army acquaintance now out for revenge. Ogden is a well-drawn, reprehensible character who's now ready to ply his "trade" on a bigger stage. --Tom Lavoie, retired publisher and poet