With his new novel, Vancouver writer Trevor Clark takes readers deep into Toronto’s dark underbelly, an emotionally barren world of guns, drugs, and casual violence. It’s a world without joy, but that’s only part of what makes Hair-Trigger a joyless reading experience.

The novel follows a hapless trio of Toronto men and the women they interact with (“form relationships with” would be inaccurate). Derrick Rowe, the manager of a business bookstore, has experience committing low-level bank robberies; Burly Jack Lofton has his own criminal past and a problem with booze; and Robert O’Hara is a bodybuilder who dabbles in cocaine dealing. Together, the three men plan what has to be the worst, most disorganized bank heist ever put to paper, setting off a chain of repercussions that – no surprise here – ends in bloodshed.

There exists no shortage of terrific crime novels featuring morally dubious characters in free-fall, and many novels feature characters brought up short by unforeseen consequences. Similarly, there is a great deal of enjoyment to be found in exploring the darkness of a city from the comfort of one’s reading chair. Unfortunately, Hair-Trigger never rises to its potential.

The novel is not without pleasures. It is written in a lean, parsed style, with crisp dialogue that nicely supports the vivid, realistic, noirish portrait of contemporary Toronto. However, the characters aren’t well enough developed for the reader to care about their eventual fates, and the writing is so perfunctory that any sense of suspense, dread, or mounting tension fails to accrue. Things happen – from burgeoning relationships to drive-by shootings to vicious beatings – but they’re unanchored, and seem to drift away from the reader’s attention without ever really registering.

Ultimately, Hair-Trigger is a novel of surfaces and events. It’s vivid without assuming enough concreteness for the reader to connect.