Revolution No. 9
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Take this, brother, may it sere you well....
As he lies, bound and hidden, on the floor of his abductors' SUV, Carroll Monks is only dimly aware of the bizarre series of high-profile murders sweeping across the nation. What he thinks about instead, a they travel for hours deep into the Northern California wilderness, is that the face of one of his abductors belongs to his own son, Glenn--long estranged and living (the last Monks knew) on the streets of Seattle.
The vehicle finally stops. when Monks is untied and stpes out, he sees he's been brought to a remote off-the-grid community where paramilitary training and methamphetamine makes for combustible, uneasy bedfellows--and that Glen has fallen under the spell of a disenfranchised counter-cultural sociopath known simply as Freeboot, who claims that a revolution "of the people" is already under way. Monks is appalled by Freeboot's violent histrionics and Manson-like affinity for the hidden messages buried within Lennon and McCartney lyrics, yet acknowledges that he hears echoes of his won feelings when Freeboot speaks about the disintegration of workers' rights, the escalating differential between the haves and the have-nots, and the slap-on-the-wrist "justice" doled out in cases of billion-dollar corporate malfeasance. Could this well-armed madman actually have his finger on teh pulse of the underclass?
The reason Monks has been abducted, he soon discovers, is Freeboot's own son, a four-year-old boy who is deathly ill--a conundrum for Freeboot, who's distrust of institutional America (hospitals included) borders on the psychotic. Monks, and ER physician, has been brought in to care for the boy, but he can see immediately that the boy's condition is acute and that only immediate hospitalization will save him. When Monk's pleas fall on deaf ears, he fashions a daring escape during a snowstorm, with the young boy slung across his back--and brings the wrath of a madman down on himself and his family, culminating in a diabolically crafted "revolution"--a re-creation of Hitchcock's The Birds, but with human predators, unleashed on the town of Bodega Bay, California.
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In his fourth thriller about reluctant medical hero Dr. Carroll Monks (after 2003's To the Bone), McMahon pulls off the virtually impossible: he creates a lunatic terrorist adversary so believable that he quickly becomes touchingly real. "Freeboot," as the leader of a band of dedicated, deranged outlaws who live on a secluded tract of land in the mountains of Northern California calls himself, is "a macho speed freak who dominated his followers, made allusions to Machiavelli, and hinted at the grandiose importance that he would enjoy in the eyes of history." Monks gets involved when Freeboot's three-year-old son becomes seriously ill, and the doctor's own long-estranged son a member of Freeboot's terrorist tribe that's chosen the titular Beatles song as their anthem suggests kidnapping the medical man to treat the child. The boy turns out to be in a dangerous diabetic condition, and Monks's first chore (aside from staying alive) is to treat his illness and then find a way to get the child to a hospital. Since Freeboot and his followers have actually begun their revolution by killing some leading citizens and scattering their stolen objects among the homeless, the terrorist is ready to sacrifice his child for his cause. Dr. Monks, his son already lost, is equally determined to keep the little boy alive. In McMahon's cool, expert hands, it becomes a duel both fascinating and frighteningly real.
