Blood Standard
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A novel set in the underbelly of upstate New York that's as hardboiled and punchy as a swift right hook to the jaw, a classic noir for fans of James Ellroy and John D. Macdonald.
Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska--he's tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends the money-making scheme of a made man, he gets in the kind of trouble that can lead to a bullet behind the ear.
Saved by the grace of his boss and exiled to upstate New York, Isaiah begins a new life, a quiet life without gunshots or explosions. Except a teenage girl disappears, and Isaiah isn't one to let that slip by. And delving into the underworld to track this missing girl will get him exactly the kind of notice he was warned to avoid.
At turns brutally shocking and darkly funny, heartbreaking and cautiously hopeful, Blood Standard is both a high-tension crime novel and the story of a man's second chance--the parts of his past he will never escape, and the parts that will shape his future.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Laird Barron is a three-time winner of horror's prestigious Shirley Jackson Award, but it turns out he's brilliant at hard-boiled crime thrillers too. Isaiah Coleridge had it good as an enforcer in the Alaskan mob—until he made life difficult for a rival gang and had to resettle in upstate New York. Blood Standard blends fish-out-of-water humor with a plot as tight—and deadpan violent—as vintage Jim Thompson or Richard Stark tales. Even more importantly, Coleridge is a wry, witty narrator we instinctively root for even as we learn he was very, very good at his old job.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barron's often formulaic first crime novel falls short of the high standard set by his horror fiction (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories). Isaiah Coleridge aspires to be a Sam Spade like gumshoe, but instead he works as a strongman for the Mafia's Alaskan branch. On a mission in Nome, where Isaiah, who was never "a hunter of dumb beasts," is supposed to help "local mob potentate" Vitale Night massacre walruses for their ivory, he impulsively hits Vitale in the throat as the two men stand in the bow of a boat. Night's lieutenant takes Isaiah captive, and Isaiah barely escapes execution before fleeing to New York's Hudson Valley, where he starts a new life as a farmhand. When a teenage girl, the granddaughter of his employers, disappears, Isaiah finally gets to act out his PI fantasies and investigate. Baroque prose only belabors the conceit ("We moved against them as a bloodless dawn glow filtered through the canopy"). Since Barron has done imaginative and memorable work in the past, he could still salvage this series. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
On the boil
The author hails from Alaska, lives in upstate New York, and wears an eye patch like pirate! (Ocular tumour as a child I believe) He’s written several books and story collections in the fantasy/horror genre. Now he’s turned his hand to crime.
Isiah Coleridge is a half-Maori, half-whatever and a seriously big unit. He’s working as an enforcer for organised crime (“The Outfit”) in Alaska when he has a falling out with a superior over walrus well-being.
A personal godfather intervenes in time to avert Isiah’s unpleasant demise, but banishes him to work and rehabilitate on a horse farm run by New Agers in the Catskills. Our hero has six siblings or half siblings he never sees, and has a testy relationship with his old man, a tyrannical ex-Marine, who lives with his second wife not far away from the farm.
A black teenager with behavioural problems who does day rehab at the farm disappears. Isiah and a grizzled veteran with a drinking problem decide to investigate. Turns out the FBI is involved too.
This is hard boiled fiction at its best: fast pace, snappy dialogue, frequent plot twists. Book 2 Black Mountain came out recently. I’m looking forward to it.
4.5 stars