eBook The Coldest Mile ePub

I wasn't expecting this one to move as fast as 2008's THE COLD SPOT, but it does. In fact, like our anti-hero Chases' GTO, it actually moves faster.

On a mission to locate his tougher-than-nails grandfather Jonah (as well as Jonah's daughter Kylie), Chase makes his way through the brutal NJ underworld before heading down to Florida. During his trip he gets involved with a couple of different crews, manages to piss of everyone from the low man to the Main Man (and Woman), and somehow avoids the temptations of the sexy Hildy (a street girl who floats between gangs) while keeping her just close enough to find out what he needs to know.

THE COLDEST MILE just didn't want to leave my hands; Piccirilli's prose is as smooth and readable as ever, his characters gritty, scary, and real, and I can't recall this many things happening in a single crime novel since Mario Puzo's grossly underrated OMERTA.

With action and suspense-filled gun fights, knife fights, fist fights, scams, cons, double and triple-crosses, car chases, and, as with THE COLD SPOT, no filler, fans of this neo-noir saga can only hope there's another Chase adventure on the horizon.

Don't miss this.

Following up 2008's pedal-to-the-metal THE COLD SPOT, Tom Piccirilli coaxes even more hosepower out of his new release, THE COLDEST MILE. This lovingly crafted throwback to the golden age of noir features wheelman extraordinaire Chase, drawn right back into the bent life after the murder of his cop wife Lila and the kidnapping of his baby aunt Kylie.

Haunted by the unsolved murder of his pregnant mother fifteen years ago, and fearing that his sociopathic grandfather Jonah - the man who introduced him to a life of crime in his early teens - knows more about the crime than he is letting on, Chase scores a Jersey mob family slowly sinking into irrelevence and hits the road. He wants desperately to save Kylie from the doomed life he knows is in store for her if she stays with her father Jonah.

Along the way Chase encounters a twisted mob princess, hitters and low-lifes and second-rate "strings" and double-crossing chicks and, of course, Jonah, the seventy year old stone killer who is always at least a step ahead and whose only rule in life is to protect himself.

THE COLDEST MILE is filled with action, from the opening-paragraph murder all the way to one final, shocking revelation. It is dark and witty, heartless and filled with heart. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Yes, it's a good, fast-paced read, with crisp, mostly realistic dialog, which I love. For that I'm thankful. But by about halfway through I found myself getting tired of words and phrases that were already overused in The Cold Spot and that I never hear anywhere else, like "mook" and "bent life". I also grew weary of the imaginary underworld Piccirilli has created, in which all the most successful thieves, bank robbers, killers and con artists are part of a huge network where, without too much trouble, one can "put his ear to the wire" and find out what almost any other member of this vast network is up to. If the underworld really was that much like a criminal version of the Kevin Bacon movie game, the "feebs" (Piccirillese for FBI agents) would have infiltrated it and arrested them all by now. Even so, though, this book is easily good enough for four stars, because of the fun way it's written and the action-packed pace. This and The Cold Spot are both so well written that I almost didn't notice that the underlying premise is a make-believe world. I'd have given it five stars had I been able to suspend disbelief completely. Am I being hypercritical? Probably.

I first came across Tom Piccirilli's work a few years ago when I attended a Worldcon conference in Boston. I'd never been to anything like it before, and went to learn more about the writing world. Terry Pratchett was the guest of honor, urban fantasy was amping up in popularity and Harry Potter was still going strong. I felt a mix of awe and disappointment--I attended a lot of interesting panels, coffee klatches and the like. The parties were great, too. But along with this I felt a little disappointment in what I felt was an overbearing amount of kitsch. My concerns weren't about skill or artistry in this regard; not about saying one thing was `good' and another `bad'. No, I was thinking more about aesthetics. I had grown up on early Stephen King, plenty of 19th Century British novels and Dostoevsky. I liked movies like HEAT, SCARFACE and THE RING. I was someone comfortable with the truly grim and tragic and unabashedly seeking out books and stories that were edgy and disturbing. Yet I also wanted something with a very strong sense of character and thirst for insight.

The last day of the conference I swooped in on book stalls hoping for some last minute deals. I wasn't finding much.

Then this girl walked up and handed me a free copy of A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN. I read the first page and split to finish the rest.

And so: it may sound strong, and it's meant to: the one-two punch of its prose style and storyline reinvigorated my interest in contemporary fiction. A southern gothic piece of ambiguous supernatural dread, CHOIR was able to sneak up and knock me out with its wistful concern for a deranged, cursed family simply trying to survive into the next generation. And there were plenty of layers of complexity seeping up from underneath--the figurative language, brutal violence, ghost imagery and ravaged landscapes. It had a serious tone overall, and yet, the contrasts generated by characters in grim situations still being able to act casual in a believable way managed to be funnier than a lot of the kitschy, slapstick stuff I had been bombarded with.

So, I picked up NOVEMBER MOURNS next, then HEADSTONE CITY, then THE MIDNIGHT ROAD, reveling in reading someone who had obviously gone from student of the craft, to professional, and to, in my opinion, one of the best in the business. One saw that these borderline horror novels were drifting step by step to full-on crime noir. They were going from supernatural horror with a thriller feel to crime noir with a touch of the surreal.

And yet, unlike my relationship with Stephen King's writing, I didn't find myself losing interest with the `genre change'. Instead, I felt like the author was saying to the horror fans, `Hey, you like that? Let me show you this..." The clothing changed, but the quick pulse remained.

Which brings us to the COLD series. Chase the car thief plies his trade under the watchful eye of his crime-hardened grandfather. As Chase quits the crew and comes of age, he begins watching back, reviewing all the man has done for him and against him. With Chase, we see a completely new angle on the crime trope of `cops and criminals are so similar'. It revolves around family being the source and final consequence of all virtues and vices. As Chase bounces between thieving and teaching high school, going from rogue to married man and back again, we see how much both lifestyles depend on who your allies and enemies are. Being awake or asleep, being in or out of a relationship, it all takes on a dreamlike quality where deciding what's real becomes as difficult as deciding what's valuable.

Piccirilli packs plenty of action into this process. By the time we reach the second book, we've seen Chase on the road and in the city, getting tangled up with police, pickpockets, rednecks and other violent thieves. We witness him work it out with some wonderfully brutal fist and knife fights with both men and women. All around him are characters finding fates worthy of George R.R. Martin on an unforgiving day. These characters are drawn with dexterous depth that is a tribute to the author's style. Some make it, some don't. I won't spoil it with who's who (at least, not any more than the blurbs on the backs of the books do). I'll just say that it matters that we can actually worry about death and damage resulting from the violence, including realistic results dished out to the protagonist himself.

Beneath it all, we see Chase struggling not so much with recognizing the disloyalty of family and accepting or rejecting it. Instead we see him figuring out how the customs of loyalty/disloyalty in his family fit into the landscape of all families with traditions of their own. We see him figuring out his relationship with loyalty itself. It becomes very interesting to watch where Chase decides to be loyal and where to be disloyal, when to lie and when to be honest. His integrity ends up manifesting itself in some very original ways. In THE COLDEST MILE, Chase's meandering, morally ambidextrous nature contributes an extra surprise and extra wallop to the final showdown. Experiencing this alone is worth reading the book for.

Don't think my compliments come easy; there are a few places where my bubble was proverbially burst--like when the car thief expresses his love for Broadway; I didn't know whether to throw my book across the Greyhound or burst out in song. Well, I was humbled when I kept reading and found out his taste in plays. Also, there were a few places where I was tempted to try and nit-pick about crime realism. And yet, 99.9% of the crimes and scams described are so well put together, one has to hope it comes just from thorough research...

I could go on--cars as ghosts, Detroit as collective ghost, dreams that go beyond heaven and hell... But I'll leave it at this: if you haven't gotten in on this series and this author's books, do so; particularly if you're a junkie for the true dark, and especially if you're a junkie for the juice.