Although I thought Sutton had a number of fairly significant flaws, I couldn't put it down, and I was genuinely moved and surprised at several points without ever having felt manipulated. For that, I think it's worth a good four stars. I give it five because it's about a historical character but doesn't pretend to be historical - you know from the outset that it's a work of fiction, so you can dream along with the author and, for that matter, the characters. And such well-written dreams they are.

Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, is now old and dying. He's been released from jail on Christmas Eve and his lawyer has committed him to spend Christmas Day giving an exclusive interview. The old man, the Reporter, and the Photographer set off on a roundabout route that tells the story of Willie's life in chronological order. The three men have vastly different agendas for the trip, though, and they see and hear everything differently - and Willie's story plays mostly in his head and doesn't always match the few things he tells his companions or the bulky files that the Reporter keeps referring to. What really happened? How many narratives of a man's life exist side by side? Who gets to decide which of them are real?

One criticism: For most of the book, I wondered why Moehringer bothered with the Reporter and the Photographer - it frequently seemed an awkward framing/plot device and got a bit tedious. It serves a purpose thematically and has its own purpose at the end, although I'm not sure it completely pays its way. Perhaps it's just that Willie is so much more interesting than anyone else in his own stories, and Moehringer seems to feel the same way.