The “romanticism” of the criminal lifestyle and the severe complications that accompany such a life are thrillingly presented in Peter Craig’s “Hot Plastic.”

Set in the mid-1980s, “Hot Plastic” is a tumultuous adventure detailing the lives of three con artists: Jerry, Kevin, who is Jerry’s son, and Colette.

Continuously on the lam and always running a number of different scams, each member of the trio utilizes special skills with, and occasionally against, the others to cleverly steal and con money or goods from a broad range of unsuspecting victims.

Kevin, a teenager at the beginning of the novel, quickly shows a knack for the technical, learning how to rip off ATMs and reprogram credit cards.

After much practice, he also develops the ability to pickpocket while on a skateboard, becoming a punk rock Artful Dodger on wheels.

Jerry, a lifetime criminal and womanizer, is at first hesitant to get Kevin involved, but soon realizes Kevin’s potential and encourages his deviant behavior. Jerry specializes in the face-to-face con and moving large amounts of stolen goods to fences all over the United States.

Colette is the catalyst for action throughout the novel. Only slightly older than Kevin, she easily plays on people’s sympathies with her acting skills and is comfortable with both traditional shoplifting and the long, involved large-scale identity theft scams.

Her romantic involvements with Jerry, and later Kevin, subtly increase the viscosity of the plot, pitting the father and son against each other, providing each with an enemy to gripe about.

In their search for the “big score,” the three characters put their differences and unrequited loves aside, forming a hyper-dysfunctional family that effectively intertwines love, betrayal and deceit.

“Hot Plastic” has a basic plot with a number of predictable twists and turns. In his attempt to convey the adventurous life of grifters, Craig employs clich‚ settings and scenarios; however, the details of the various cons Jerry, Kevin and Colette run are specific and well-researched.

Craig has a hard-boiled style of writing, sticking to the basics of description and setting development, and focuses on stereotypically salient features, as in this sketch of a pastoral cottage: “light the color of dust and straw, the ground and fences netted with raindrops drying in the grassy heat, the landscape a bunched quilt of green and yellow squares, some fields of bare earth, hemmed with blotted bushes, and a sunken stream that twisted through the terrain like an indented scar.”

Craig triumphs in his characterization, as Colette, Kevin and Jerry are all realistic and endearingly dynamic individuals. The rapport between the three is stunningly developed, and the way the characters grow through their relationships with each other rings true to life.

Kevin, for example, changes drastically over the five years the novel spans from a dependent, na‹ve kid to an expert con artist who is stubbornly independent. Colette grows up as well, but her bittersweet personality remains intact, a feat not easy to render in a novel of action and suspense.

In the strong current of Craig’s fast-paced novel, the human qualities of the characters are quiet eddies of talented writing.

Despite the predictable plot and stock scenarios, “Hot Plastic” is truly a book that is difficult to put down (I stayed up all night reading it), full of action and skillful writing.