His entry begins:During the school year, which is about to start, I rarely have time to read for fun. During the summer, when I am traveling and working on my own stuff, I tend to have a few books on the go at once: one by the bed, one in my bag for the subway or waiting rooms, one that I am saving for a long flight or a day at the beach. Also I tend to mix a heavier book, that I read slowly and ponder, or nap over, with a faster, funnier or more thrilling one. Here are the handful that I have around right now:About The Bouncer, from the publisher:
Simenon - a biography by Pierre Assouline. I am a long time fan of Simenon, who created one of the great detective series with his character Inspector Maigret, and also great psychological noir thrillers, which he cranked out by the dozen, often writing a whole novel in fifteen days. He was also a kind of maniac, compulsive about writing, sex, money, smoking, travel. So when I came across this biography in a used bookshop, I decided to check it out. A fascinating character. A monster in many ways. And...[read on]
In David Gordon’s diabolically imaginative new thriller, The Bouncer, nothing and no one is as expected—from a vial of yellow fragrance to a gangster who moonlights in women’s clothes.Learn more about the book and author at David Gordon's blog.
Joe Brody is just your average Dostoevsky-reading, Harvard-expelled strip club bouncer who has a highly classified military history and whose best friend from Catholic school happens to be head mafioso Gio Caprisi. FBI agent Donna Zamora, the best shot in her class at Quantico, is a single mother stuck at a desk manning the hotline. Their storylinesintersect over a tip from a cokehead that leads to a crackdown on Gio’s strip joint in Queens and Joe’s arrest—just one piece of a city-wide sweep aimed at flushing out anyone who might have a lead on the various terrorists whose photos are hanging on the wall under Most Wanted. Outside the jailhouse, the Fed and the bouncer lock eyes, as Gordon launches them both headlong into a nonstop plot that goes from back-road gun show intervention to high-stakes perfume heist and manages to touch everyone from the CIA to the Flushing Triads. Beneath it all lurks a sinister criminal mastermind whose manipulations could cause chaos on a massively violent scale.
For readers who like a heavy dose of fun with their murder, this is crime fiction at its freshest, from a virtuoso of the “darkly comic, stylish literary thriller” (Associated Press).
The Page 69 Test: The Serialist.
Writers Read: David Gordon (July 2013).
The Page 69 Test: Mystery Girl.
The Page 69 Test: White Tiger on Snow Mountain.
Writers Read: David Gordon.
--Marshal Zeringue
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