Need an entertaining escape from the troubles of our times? Fun City Heist (Severn House 2025) by Michael Kardos just might be your answer. If you enjoy Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake novels, you will find Fun City Heist delightfully entertaining.
As a one-time professional drummer, it seems inevitable that writer Michael Kardos would eventually get around to creating a novel about a band getting together for one last gig. As inevitable as a band wanting to get together for one last gig. Seems as if they all do it—no matter how ugly their break-up was. Fun City Heist is Kardos’s hilarious, twisty tale of the rock band Sunshine Apocalypse and their improbable reunion at the New Jersey theme park where they got their start. Even more improbable is the way former frontman Johnny Clay leads his band mates to agree to steal the proceeds from the theme park during their July 4 performance. That’s right—during their performance.
Washed-up drummer Mo Melnick stars as the heartbeat, not only of the band, but also of the story. With no positive life goals, he lazes on the beach, renting out umbrellas and chairs all summer. In the winter, he picks up landscape work. Other former band members seem equally unmotivated to do anything useful with their lives. Until Johnny Clay shows up with a sob story designed to pull them into one last performance. After hearing Johnny’s pitch, Mo realizes he needs to change:
“I can’t sit in this chair for the next thirty summers. I can’t sit in this chair for the next thirty minutes. I should want it. . . .
I drink in all the sights and smells and sounds of Quartz Beach. I tell myself it’s simply not possible for this to be a mistake, until a thought whams into my skull so hard it’s like my head is inside a bass drum: Drowning doesn’t look like drowning. . .
Johnny Clay might be a liar who nonetheless told one truth, which is that I need the dame gig, this last hurrah that’s supposed to be an ending, with money that’s supposed to be a beginning.”
Finally, Mo recognizes he has been drowning. Floundering. Going nowhere. He needs to change.
Another impetus for Mo to change is the arrival of his teenage biological daughter—one he has had no relationship with. Janice plunks down her backpack and informs him she is sleeping on his couch the rest of the summer. She turns out to have fantastic guitar skills that come in handy when the band’s guitarist sustains a hand injury. She is also quite the clever young woman and adds intriguing twists to the plot.
As with any good caper story, true villains appear—thugs from Mo’s adolescence, who haven’t softened their criminal tendencies one iota. If anything, they have honed them to a threatening degree.
A female police officer adds a possible love interest to the story—but also adds the danger that she will uncover the plans for the heist.
Fun City Heist offers page-turning tension, plenty of surprising plot twists, and one obstacle after another littering the path to the band’s successful comeback. Check it out. You’ll be glad you did.
Michael Kardos
Michael Kardos is the 55-year-old, two-time Pushcart Prize-winning author of three previous novels: The Three-Day Affair, Before He Finds Her and most recently Bluff, as well as the story collection One Last Good Time. Originally from the Jersey Shore, he co-directed the creative writing program at Mississippi State University for over a dozen years before moving with his family to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Michael also earned a bachelor’s degree in music and played the drums professionally in his twenties as part of a band who were booked at a lot of clubs, slept on a lot of sofas— and accrued a lot of musical war stories. But he’s never pulled off a heist (that he’ll admit to).
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