Blood Standard
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- £4.99
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.
