Criminal 5: The Sinners

I don’t know if this is the longest volume yet in the Criminal series but it sure felt like it. There’s a lot of plot to get through. When last we left tough guy Tracy Lawless he’d gone to work, reluctantly, for Center City’s crime boss Sebastian Hyde. As things get going here he’s basically an enforcer and hit man, but Mr. Hyde thinks he’s not a team player and is too soft because he only whacks people who have it coming, not just anyone the boss man thinks needs whacking.

A problem has arisen though in that a bunch of crooked but supposedly protected types (“made men”) are being offed and nobody can figure out who’s doing it. Hyde puts Lawless on the case, which ends up involving a gang of vigilantes looking to clean up the mean streets. At the same time the army has sent a special agent after Lawless, who has technically gone AWOL. And Lawless is trying to rein in Hyde’s wild child of a daughter while at the same time having an affair with Hyde’s wife.

There’s a lot going on that needs to get sorted out, which it is in the usual brutal fashion. The pieces all fit together nicely though and I thought this was the best constructed story in the series so far. The only complain I’d register has to do with the speech balloons. These are often doubled so that two balloons are placed side by side with an open gap between them. The problem is that the space doesn’t make it clear if the text should be read straight across or in all of one bubble first and then on to the next. Once you get used to it you can read it more easily, but it remains a bit off-putting.

Graphicalex