Review by New York Times Review
When it comes to great settings for a crime novel, there's no place like home. For Stephan Talty, that's Buffalo, which he has made both the locale and a major character in his first thriller, BLACK IRISH (Ballantine, $26). As viewed by Detective Absalom (Abbie) Kearney, lately returned to care for a father whose mind is going, Buffalo is a decaying place, sunk in despair, haunted by its illustrious past. "The whole city was entombed by the artifacts of its glory days," she observes of the disintegrating waterfront, the bankrupt mills and "silent" smokestacks, the highways built for a population long gone. And nowhere is this sense of loss more keenly felt than in the section where Abbie grew up, "a patch of Ireland in the wilds of America" known as the County. "Some parts of the neighborhood never changed. The clannish logic. The hostility to outsiders. The secret, ancient warmth. The alcoholism." But while attitudes may have remained inflexible, the County has hardly escaped the passage of time. Drugs are in the schools, families are on welfare and churches have been abandoned, including St. Teresa's, which Abbie attended as a child - the same church where the mutilated body of Jimmy Ryan has turned up in the basement. As the adopted daughter of a revered local cop, Abbie is familiar with the strict social protocols observed in the County. But as someone who moved away and only recently made her way back, armed with a fancy college degree and a refined accent, she'll always be an outsider. None of these clannish people, who bear "an ancestral memory of being oppressed in a country they'd never been to," trust her on this murder case, which escalates into unspeakable savagery as the bodies pile up. The technical police work is not very convincing, and by placing Abbie and her family at the heart of the mystery, Talty limits his detective's objectivity. But there's something hypnotic about the voices heard up and down the streets and in holy places like the Gaelic Club, "the mother ship of the County," which was once the setting for dances and weddings and rowdy political gatherings. Now it's the scene of its own wake, a sight that strikes Abbie as unbearably sad. But, as the bartender observes, "anything that's dying's beautiful for a while." "No one likes a woman who knows how to kill with her bare hands." Brigid Quinn, the unconventional heroine of Becky Masterman's first novel, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING (Minotaur, $24.99), learned that lesson in her former career as an undercover F.B.I. agent. Nowadays, if anyone should ask, Brigid will say she investigated copyright infringements, since she's a fanatic about guarding her secrets from the new husband she adores. Although Brigid is determined to enjoy her early retirement in laid-back Tucson ("which everyone told me was a lovely place but that felt a lot like Siberia, only hot"), it's just her bad luck to attract a killer rapist who claims "older broads" as his "specialty." Still in fighting shape at 59, Brigid is one old broad who is tough to kill. So tough she accidentally kills this creep. Unfortunately, in her panic to cover up the deed, she alerts another maniac cruising the old Route 66, which for serial killers is "kind of like the Appalachian Trail, only paved." Brigid wears her age well, and she makes it work for her too. She knows people would like to think that as they get older "all women must get suddenly serene, their anger draining away with their estrogen." Some do, some don't. So, take her or leave her, "this is Brigid Quinn, a woman of a certain age, raging." Legal mysteries would be much more enjoyable if they didn't have self-aggrandizing lawyers in them. Lachlan Smith makes tidy work of neutralizing that problem in his first novel, BEAR IS BROKEN (Mysterious Press/Grove/ Atlantic, $24), by introducing us to Teddy Maxwell, a San Francisco attorney with the reputation of being "about as crooked as a lawyer can be." Sadly, this wonderful rogue (possessed of "a brilliance realized most fully in its decadent form") is shot in the head while having lunch with his kid brother, Leo. While Teddy lies in a coma, Leo, who's just passed his bar exam, does a respectable job of representing his brother's thuggish clients. He's also well on the way to nailing Teddy's attacker when Smith gets all tangled up in an unnecessarily complicated ending. Overplotting is a beginner's mistake, but Smith doesn't write like a novice. He'll surely get the hang of it next time. The free-for-all in DONNYBROOK (Ferrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15) is a "three-day bareknuckles tournament" that a rich and sadistic patron of the arts holds on his 1,000-acre spread in rural Indiana. In Frank Bill's brutally funny first novel, fighters come from miles around to bash one another's brains out, until the last man standing is awarded a cool hundred grand. Among the brawlers and sports fans making the trek to this backwoods battlefield are Jarhead Earl, a lovable lug from the hills of southeastern Kentucky; Ali Squires ("Bare. Knuckle. God"); and Chainsaw Angus, a mad-dog meth dealer who, with his sister, Liz ("pure poison"), makes up a tag team of killers. Fun is fun, but Bill is also keeping track of the human fallout: the "children hanging from mothers anchored by out-of-work fathers" who live in "rotted houses and beat-down trailers" on country roads, waiting for the meth dealer to show up. A scene that could definitely make you want to fight. Stephan Talty makes the city of Buffalo both the locale and a major character in his first thriller.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 24, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
In the first novel from the author of the short-story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana (2011), characters fight, fornicate, tweak, drink, fight, betray, rob, kill, and fight en route to an annual bare-knuckle brawling tournament in, yes, southern Indiana, where they hope variously to deal meth, take revenge, and win the top prize of $100,000. Crimes had power but lacked finesse; Donnybrook has even more power and even less finesse. The prose is studiously untutored, rife with sentence fragments, unorthodox word use, and overheated metaphors that don't always scan. (Simple restraint would be welcome: must a character raise his hairy appendages ? Can't he just raise his arms?) Even readers who adapt to the voice may be turned off by the uniformly deformed characters: with so many ugly people doing so many ugly things, it's just hard to care what happens to them. And if Bill has empathy for his own creations, he hides it awfully well. Readers who like hard-edged stories of down-and-outers would be better served by Willy Vlautin or Daniel Woodrell.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bill's debut novel (after his short story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana) trails another ruck of miscreants as they cook, shoot, snort, screw, punch, and head-butt their way across the Ohio River to backwoods gangster Bellmount McGill's annual donnybrook, a three-day, bare-knuckle free-for-all. Wanting the big-money pot to make a new life for his kids and their Oxy-addicted mother, tavern brawler Jarhead Earl robs a local gun shop for the $1,000 entry fee. Double-crossing tweaker Ned Newton steals his stake from crank cooker Chainsaw Angus. Ned and the dealer's hateful sister, Liz, haul Angus's product to the 'brook, which promises to make them a mint. Left for dead, Angus tears a trail of mayhem in their pursuit, trying to shake Fu Xi, a debt-collecting torture artist, and Ross Whalen, a vengeful deputy sheriff with secrets more vile than the acid burns and chainsaw accidents that flare up along the way. Waiting for them all is Purcell, a prophet of the johnboat who foresees calamity, strives for good, and whose appearance in Jarhead's life suggests a possible sequel. Fun and fast but with a prose so pulpy it sometimes turns to mush, this book lands its best punches below the belt. Agent: Stacia Decker, Donald Maass Literary Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Practitioner of a genre sometimes dubbed "rural noir," Bill sets his first novel (which follows his debut story collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana) in the backwaters of southeastern Kentucky and centers it on an ex-marine known as Jarhead. Desperate to feed his family, Jarhead robs a liquor store to pay the entry fee for the Donnybrook, a notorious bare-knuckles tournament in southern Indiana, where he hopes to win the competition's substantial purse. Set against his story is that of Chainsaw Angus, a retired bare-knuckles fighter, and Angus's sister, Liz, who have taken to cooking meth. After Liz and her opportunistic boyfriend, Ned, shoot Angus to steal a batch of meth, he too, makes his way to the Donnybrook, seeking revenge. The road behind is littered with bodies as the fighters brawl their way to Indiana, where Jarhead and Ned square off in the Donnybrook's horrific finale. -VERDICT A violently brutal tale of survival by strength and instinct, this punch in the gut of a novel isn't for the faint of heart. [See Prepub Alert, 9/27/12.]-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This is a novel that guts the underbelly of southern Indiana and leaves the reader with either a rush of adrenaline or a wave of loathing. Jarhead can't find a job to feed his hungry babies, so he robs a gun store for $1,000--not a dollar more or a dollar less. His only skill is bare-knuckle fighting, and he needs the money for the entry fee to the Donnybrook, a tournament where 20 men fight each other in a 30-by-30 enclosure until only one is left standing. Winners advance through several rounds, producing an ultimate winner who takes home a hundred grand in cash. It's the only path Jarhead can see for a better life for his family. Unfortunately, it's a path soaked in blood. Nearly everyone else of importance in this grim tale is a murderer, a meth dealer or user, a whore or an abuser of whores. Chainsaw Angus is Jarhead's biggest obstacle in the Donnybrook, as he has never lost a fight in his life. Chainsaw's sister Liz is a prostitute who puts a bullet in a man's head while they are having sex. Bill portrays depravity and violence as few others can--or perhaps as few others dare to do. The problem is that most of the characters are one-dimensional, irredeemable, sorry wastes of protoplasm. It's hard to imagine so many people showing so little decency in the same story. Yet the plot builds relentlessly to the final round of the Donnybrook and gives the reader unexpected jolts all the way through to an ending that strongly suggests a sequel. Bill is one hell of a storyteller. If he makes his characters a little more complex, he could become one of the best, but this book doesn't quite get him there.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
