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Summary
Summary
In this wild and hilarious debut thriller, Peter Brown is a young Manhattan emergency room doctor with a past, a secret, and a gun--and has 24 hours to save himself and beat the reaper.
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 (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Making a hit man turned medical intern a sympathetic figure would be a tall order for most authors, but first-time novelist Bazell makes it look easy in this breezy and darkly comic suspense novel. The Locanos, a mob family, take in 14-year-old Pietro Brwna (pronounced "Browna") after a couple of thugs gun down the grandparents who raised him in their New Jersey home. Bent on revenge, Pietro pursues the killers and executes them a year later. Impressed by Pietro's performance, David Locano recruits Pietro as a hit man. After more traumas, Pietro tries to make a break from his past by entering the witness protection program. Now known as Peter Brown, he eventually lands a position as a doctor at a decrepit Manhattan hospital, where by chance a former Mafia associate turns up as a patient and threatens to rat him out. The hero's wry narrative voice, coupled with Bazell's artful use of flashbacks to sustain tension and fill in Pietro's past, are a winning combination. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Who would have thought that extreme violence liberally sprinkled with obscenities could be both funny and tender? That's the case with this first-person story of Dr. Peter Brown, a successful Mafia hit man as a teenager who enters witness protection and turns to medicine. After the grandparents who raised him are murdered when he's 14, Brown is virtually adopted by the family of his best friend, Adam Locano, and his desire for revenge is channeled by Adam's father into killing by contract. A falling-out with the Locanos, after Peter throws Adam out a sixth floor window (for ample reason), leads to his new life. But when he runs into a patient from his old world at the Manhattan hospital where he's now an intern, it appears his own death warrant may have been signed. First-novelist and medical resident Bazell appears to have had as much fun writing this fast-paced, absorbing entertainment (complete with romantic subplot) as many will reading it. A remarkably accomplished debut.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the opening scene of "Beat the Reaper," the former mob hit man Dr. Peter Brown pauses in the act of disabling a mugger to give readers a paragraph-length tutorial on the architecture of the human arm. Halfway through the paragraph he throws in an asterisk, and in a footnote points out that the lower leg is a lot like the forearm, only less fragile. That footnote had me worried. Nothing ruins a story faster than a teller who can't stay out of the way of his own tale, and for a narrator to interrupt himself in the middle of interrupting himself is usually a very bad sign. Fortunately, Brown's creator, the novelist (and doctor) Josh Bazell, is an unusually talented writer. Most of the many digressions in "Beat the Reaper," his first book, are genuinely entertaining, and the few that don't work - the footnotes are the most common culprit - annoy primarily because the story is so engaging that you don't want to be yanked out of it even for the time it takes to glance at the bottom of the page. Bazell's protagonist, né Pietro Brnwa, used to be a contract killer for the Mafia, as mentioned. But eight years ago, following a work-related dispute that involved throwing his best friend out a window, he had a change of heart, entered a witness-protection program and enrolled in medical school. Now he heals people instead of murdering them - although, as the incident with the mugger shows, he hasn't entirely given up his old ways. While on his morning rounds, Brown is recognized by a mobster named Eddy Squillante who has been hospitalized with stomach cancer. Squillante's prognosis is dire, but he's determined to beat the odds. He offers Brown a simple proposition: keep me alive and I won't tell your old bosses where you are; let me die (or kill me) and my associates start making phone calls. Brown's darkly comic struggle to save Squillante - not just from the cancer, but from the ministrations of a quack surgeon named Friendly - is intercut with highlights from his previous career. This blend of criminal and medical drama works well, and the back-and-forth between timelines keeps things moving. Bazell has a knack for breathing new life into the most timeworn genre conventions. We learn, for instance, that Brown first became a killer to avenge the murder of his grandparents. Grandma and Grandpa Brnwa weren't your typical victims, however. Polish Jews, they were survivors of both Auschwitz and, before that, the Bialowieza Forest: "They and a bunch of other newly feral teenagers were hiding out in the snow and trying to kill off enough of the local Jew-hunting parties that the Poles would leave them alone. What this precisely involved they never told me, but it must have been pretty ferocious, because in 1943 Hermann Goering had a lodge at the southern end of Bialowieza where he and his guests dressed as Roman senators, and he must have been aware of the situation. There's also the question of a straggler platoon of Hitler's Sixth Army that disappeared in Bialowieza that winter en route to Stalingrad." You can see how a family history like that might incline a guy to take revenge into his own hands. And the unfairness of the deaths - his grandparents survive the ultimate evil, only to be gunned down by a couple of punks from New Jersey - makes it even easier for Brown to make what he later acknowledges is the wrong choice. The killer with a conscience is another genre staple, and Brown is a fine specimen. Having bludgeoned men to death, he isn't overly concerned with politeness, and he tends to say exactly what he's thinking, with charming vulgarity. He's honest about his character flaws and competent in his actions, except when impulsiveness or his special moral code cause him to act like an idiot. And he has, as you'd expect, a unique way of looking at the world. At one point, while visiting the Polish forest where his grandparents played hide-and-seek with the Nazis, he spies a group of ravens in a tree. He starts thinking about the long-lived nature of parrots and asks himself whether ravens might share it, and whether these same birds might have been here during World War II: "I wondered if my grandparents had ever tried to eat them." It will not be giving too much away to say that Brown's old employers eventually do learn where he is. The climax of "Beat the Reaper'' finds him locked in a medical freezer, waiting for his archnemesis to arrive and finish him off. The plan Brown concocts to save himself is the novel's most original flourish. It is also completely outrageous, so much so that I had to stop and think about whether I could really suspend my disbelief. In the end I decided that, as with the footnotes, Bazell had more than earned my indulgence as a reader. If there's a better recommendation for a story than that, I don't know what it is. Matt Ruff's novels include "Bad Monkeys," "Set This House in Order" and "Fool on the Hill."
Guardian Review
Peter Brown is a doctor at a decrepit Manhattan hospital with an impossible caseload, incompetent colleagues and a past as a mafia hitman for a New Jersey mob who are out for his blood. When terminally ill Nicholas LoBrutto, who knows him from his previous life, turns up, Brown realises that the witness protection programme cannot help him and he must take matters into his own hands to keep his patient, and himself, alive. Funny and outrageous, with a great central character and the energy and frenetic pace sustained throughout, Bazell's first novel feels, in part, designed to appeal to devotees of television hospital drama. However, it's none the worse for that, being determinedly cynical about the US medical system and with informative footnotes. Caption: article-jancrime.3 Peter Brown is a doctor at a decrepit Manhattan hospital with an impossible caseload, incompetent colleagues and a past as a mafia hitman for a New Jersey mob who are out for his blood. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
The past comes knocking for a physician with a fistful of secrets. Medical resident Bazell opens his debut novel with a bone-crunching interlude between Manhattan ER doctor Peter Brown and a mugger whom he beats senseless, then treats for injuries. Brown soon confesses that his real name is Pietro Brnwa. He's a former hit man whose lethal trade drove him into the witness-protection program, where he reinvented himself as a pill-popping trauma physician. "It's a weird curse, when you think about it," says the killer turned doc. "We're built for thought, and civilization, more than any other creature we've found. And all we really want to be is killers." The past catches up with Brown when a terminal patient at the hospital recognizes him as the mob assassin called "Bearclaw." The patient threatens to out Brown if he does not work to save the man's life. Bazell's profane, hyperactive novel is readable and fun, and no fan of shoot-'em-ups or medical dramas can afford to miss it. Among the book's highlights is a riotous set of doctor's rounds that find Brown making out with a cancer patient, chasing down a wheelchair-bound fugitive and suffering a particularly vile needle stick. A wildly funny mashup between genres that makes ER and St. Elsewhere look tame. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The Witness Protection Program fails when a patient recognizes that Dr. Peter Brown once had another life. From a medical resident with a B.A. in writing; rights sold to more than 20 countries. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.