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Summary
Summary
It's hard to find work as a doctor when using your real name will get you killed. So hard that when a reclusive billionaire offers Dr. Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa, a job accompanying a sexy but self-destructive paleontologist on the world's worst field assignment, Brown has no real choice but to say yes. Even if it means that an army of murderers, mobsters, and international drug dealers -- not to mention the occasional lake monster -- are about to have a serious Pietro Brnwa problem.
Facing new and old monsters alike, Dr. Brnwa's story continues in this darkly funny and lightning-paced follow up to Josh Bazell's bestselling debut.
Author Notes
While finishing his medical degree, Josh Bazell also found the time to complete his first novel, a crime thriller called Beat the Reaper about a mob hitman turned doctor. Bazell wanted to be a professional writer since the age of nine, but then a few years later science became his serious interest. Bazell has now managed to attain both goals.
Josh Bazell has a BA in writing from Brown University and a MD from Columbia University. He is currently a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and is working on his second novel. (Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bazell's Beat the Reaper introduced readers to the cheerfully sadistic dentist and former mob hit man Dr. Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa. This follow-up finds Brown-teamed with femme fatale paleontologist Dr. Violet Hurst-working as a cruise ship dentist and then, abruptly, dashing off to Minnesota for numerous adventures, including a search for the White Lake Monster. Narrator Robert Petkoff delivers a fun performance that perfectly captures the sexually charged sparring between Brown and Hurst. And Petkoff is convincing both as a foul-mouthed ex-assassin and a sultry female doctor. Stephanie Wolfe shares narrating duties briefly, ably reading an aside by Hurst and the book's epilogue. This production is unabridged, but perhaps some trimming would have been wise. Bazell's novel contains numerous footnotes and asides that slow down the pace of this audio edition and prove a major distraction. A Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur hardcover. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This is a throwback to that time a decade ago when praise went to crime novels that transcended the genre, or tried to. Thus this promising story of a hired killer on the run from his own clients is constantly being stalled by digressions that are depending on your point of view fascinating or just mannered. We meet the killer after he's taken a job on a cruise ship, and the descriptions of boat life are dead-on. We follow him when he's hired by a billionaire to join the search for a mysterious sea creature in the northern U.S., and the narrative is propulsive. But the transcend argument believes it's low rent to tell a story, so we have flashbacks, dream sequences, and endless footnotes. We get disquisitions on the Jewish state, the lives of trees, and the fallacy of cryogenics. One senses an author who can't quite keep his mind on his book or maybe wishes he was writing a different book. Could be that's why the intimate moments sound like scenes from an Adam Sandler movie.--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In BEFORE THE POISON (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), Peter Robinson refutes the common assumption that romantic suspense is a woman's game. His sensitive narrator, Chris Lowndes, is a true specimen of the lonesome soul who moves into an old house that has a violent history and falls in love with the resident ghost. No sobbing heroine could be more pitiable than Chris, a veteran of decades of writing scores for Hollywood movies. The death of his wife leaves him so brokenhearted that he returns to his native England and retreats to the seclusion of the Yorkshire Dales. "I had a curious sensation that the shy, half-hidden house was waiting for me, that it had been waiting for some time," Chris says when he takes possession of the 18th-century mansion he has bought long-distance, on the strength of a few photographs. But while the real estate agent assures him no one has ever seen an apparition on the property, she neglects to explain that a former resident, Grace Fox, was hanged in 1953 for poisoning her husband. Once acquainted with the lurid details of the crime - especially Grace's scandalous affair with a local youth - Chris begins to suspect she was punished for her loose morals and might even have been innocent of murder. Unlike Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the hero of Robinson's popular detective novels, Chris hasn't the resources to conduct a formal investigation. Yet he does an outstanding job of sifting truth from gossip, traveling to London, Paris and even South Africa to interview people with firsthand knowledge of the eminent Dr. Ernest Fox and his beautiful young wife. There's a point, though, when curiosity becomes obsession, and those who care about Chris start to fear for his sanity. Robinson outdoes Daphne du Maurier in creating the proper atmosphere for the imaginative fancies of a grief-stricken man. Winds wail, snows fall and floorboards creak, accompanied by the melancholy strains of the sonata Chris is composing on Grace's grand piano. But it's not all shadows on the wall and creepy sound effects. Once Chris gets his hands on Grace's journals, written when she was a battlefield nurse in World War II, the ghostly revenant whose presence he feels in the house is swept aside by the vital woman who emerges from these pages. So, in a sense, romantic suspense does turn out to be a woman's game - but one Robinson plays very well indeed. Sebastian Becker, the former Pinkerton detective first met in Stephen Gallagner's 19th-century occult thriller "The Kingdom of Bones," returns in THE BEDLAM DETECTIVE (Crown, $25) as a special investigator for a British group called the Masters of Lunacy, whose macabre brief is to determine whether gentlemen of substance are mentally fit to handle their estates. Becker's employers are "lawyers and parasites with no other interest than to get control of a man's fortune," according to Sir Owain Lancaster, who wrote a book blaming primordial beasts for annihilating every living soul on an expedition he led into the Amazon. Sir Owain has a dilemma: stand by his book and be branded a lunatic or repudiate his claim and be censured as a fraud. Becker is also in pursuit of another beast, the one who raped and murdered two little girls, and he's convinced Sir Owain is that fiend. Gallagher's detective is a man of fine character and strong principles, but he's upstaged by the monsters he pursues. Watching Becker track down a pedophile is gratifying, but it can't beat the sight of 20 overburdened boats hurtling through white-water rapids or Sir Owain, armed to the teeth and blasting away at giant serpents only he can see. The scariest person in Elizabeth Hand's thriller AVAILABLE DARK (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $23,99) is its heroine, Cassandra Neary, a post-punk photographer who flamed out after a brief career on the Lower East Side in the down-and-dirty 1970s. These days, Cass is fueled by alcohol, speed, black metal and self-loathing. But she's still a cult figure, famous for her book of photographs, "Dead Girls," and respected for her discerning eye for transgressive art - a talent that lands her a job in Helsinki, authenticating grotesque photographs inspired by Icelandic legends for a client who collects "murderabilia." Hand could never get away with this stuff if she weren't such a strong writer. Her studies of artists and musicians are something fierce, and there's a deadly beauty to her bleak rendering of the Nordic landscape. Josh Bazell is so cute when he's angry. And he's really, really angry in WILD THING (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), the insanely funny sequel to "Beat the Reaper." The protagonist of that novel, a former hit man with a medical degree and a fake name provided by the federal witness protection program (just call him Ishmael), returns here under another pseudonym, still practicing medicine while hiding out from the mob. As junior physician on a Caribbean cruise ship, Dr. Pietro Brnwa (to call him by the name that might even be his real one) has plenty of nasty things to say about the seagoing tourist industry. But his anger really kicks in when he joins an expedition to hunt a prehistoric monster in a Minnesota lake and meets a paleontologist named Violet who explains the environmental reasons we may be "eating human flesh in the streets" in less than 30 years. Once Bazell pounces on a political topic, his wrath spills over into furious footnotes, not to mention 45 pages of source notes and an appendix that read like the work of a crackpot genius. A former resident of an 18th-century mansion was hanged for poisoning her husband.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It's hard to mistake Peter Brown. He has a hypodermic in one fist and a Colt Commander handgun in the other, and he can use them both. Introduced in 2009's Beat the Reaper, Peter's story (hit man-turned-physician) plus Bazell's frenetic, scattershot style left an indelible impression in a crowded crime fiction field. Here, Peter has been sent to White Lake, MN, in the company of a sexy paleontologist who has been working on the Poultroleum Project to convert chicken parts into oil. There have been four mysterious deaths in the area, and a local entrepreneur mounts what is billed as "the adventure of a lifetime," with entrance fees of $1 million and up, to investigate. Participation by a "high government official" is promised. Is there really a Bigfoot-type creature loose? Are the deaths the result of a local feud? Or are they an attempt to rejuvenate a flagging local economy? VERDICT Is this novel better than Bazell's debut? It's as good as and more. In addition to the mayhem and madness of the original, there's an element of ecoconsciousness and political satire (the long-delayed appearance of the government official is worth the purchase price) that will leave readers wanting still more. Bazell makes being smart sexy and footnotes fun. [See Prepub Alert, 11/28/11.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
