Fresh Kills | Bill Loehfelm

Fresh Kills | Bill Loehfelm | A complex gothic character study!

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Fresh Kills

	Fresh Kills Bill Loehfelm Putnam Adult, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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In Fresh Kills, the murder of John Sanders, Sr. on a New York street corner reunites his estranged and abused children, John, Jr. and Julia. While Julia struggles to keep things together on the home front, Junior, unhinged by his father's death, searches for the killer across the bleak, haunted landscape of his Staten Island hometown. Complicating Junior's pursuit are two police detectives: one, a former childhood friend; the other, a veteran cop who might have his own reasons to wish John, Sr. dead. Junior's affair with his high school sweetheart doesn-t exactly simplify the situation either, and his emotional state crumbles under the pressure coming at him from every side. When the opportunity for revenge presents itself, Junior must decide whether he will continue the chain of violence that has nearly destroyed his life, or give in to the possibility of a new beginning.

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Fascinating

When this story opens, John Sanders, Jr., is hungover. He's in bed with someone else's girlfriend. He mouths off to a cop and reveals he owns an illegal handgun. He swears like a sailor and seems delighted that his own father has just been murdered. I liked this character immediately.

As this story winds along, we find out the reasons behind all of the various details of this opening scene. John is not just any cold-hearted drunk--he is a man with a difficult past, a childhood he is still struggling with into his adulthood. As I spent more time in his head, I grew to like him even more.

I really enjoyed reading this story. It is about the investigation of John's father's murder, but much more than that it is about John's psychological journey. As he consoles his sister, plans a funeral, and meets up with old friends and enemies, he is forced to confront his past. John is still very damaged by a childhood of abuse, and trying to figure out how he really feels about his father's death is enough to bring him to the breaking point.

It was great to see this character grow more aware of himself and more centered as this story progressed. Despite the fact that John would have been a rather unpleasant man to meet in real life, I found myself truly caring about him and rooting for him on paper. This was an excellent novel, and I believe the characters will stick with me for quite some time.

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A complex gothic character study!

How did this first time author do that so easily? Bill Loehfelm uses a cleverly crafted blend of slow-paced, compelling action together with some down to earth, gritty, even vulgar dialogue to introduce the seeds of the plot and his characters at the same time. His use of a first person narrative allows us to form our own impressions of his hero's character through his own thoughts, words and perceptions of the events unfolding around him. We are allowed to form our own impressions and judge for ourself what we should believe and what we should take with a grain of salt.

If this is an example of Loehfelm's first outing as an author, then unerring instincts are obviously going to help fill the holes of missing experience.

John Sanders is a bartender. His lover has fled the coop and he's bedding down from time to time with a childhood sweetheart. Awakened on Sunday morning with a hard knock at the door and an even harder pounding in his head, the police advise him that his father has been murdered. Far from reacting as a grieving son devastated at the untimely death of his father, Sanders is ready to give the murderer a medal. Obviously, there's no love lost between this father and son pair. The story moves on to disclose that the investigating homicide detectives are also acquaintances of both the father and the son. At least in passing, they're going through the motions of investigating Sanders as a possible suspect in his father's murder but the most important order of business seems to be breaking the news to Julia, Sanders' sister, who he knows, unlike himself, will be devastated by the news of their father's murder.

The marketing wonks and the publicity gurus chose to set "Fresh Kills" up as "noir mystery", a "thriller with a sensitive heart". No doubt about one thing at least ... "noir" is perhaps an understatement but the fact is that after you read the book you'll discover there was little enough mystery and absolutely no thriller at all. "Fresh Kills" is a deeply complex, entirely character driven, gothic novel. This is a very internal story that portrays Sanders dealing with his demons. I would have unreservedly awarded the novel five stars but the resolution to the mystery of his father's murder, such as it is, has an outlandishly unfair deus ex machina flavour that arrives entirely out of left field. For shame, Mr Loefhelm ... a one star penalty on a fine novel which, otherwise, would have received my unreserved recommendations!

Not bad at all for a first outing! Highly recommended!

Paul Weiss

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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