The Pigeon: A Joe the Bouncer Novel (Joe The Bouncer)
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A BookPage best mystery of the month.
A New York mob fixer’s search for a stolen racing pigeon sends him into a warren of assassins.
Harvard dropout and ex-Special Forces operative Joe Brody is climbing the ranks in the criminal underworld. After successfully executing multiple missions for the various crime syndicates that run New York City, he has come to earn the trust and respect of the city’s most dangerous denizens. Which is why his newest task — retrieving a pet pigeon snatched from a rooftop coop in Brooklyn — has Joe puzzled … until he learns that the bird is valued at close to a million dollars.
Joe hatches a plan to sneak into the luxury park-side apartment building where the pigeon is held captive. But that simple plan takes a deadly turn when he stumbles upon a nest of international war criminals and a ruthless building manager overseeing the nefarious operation. Fearing that Joe's entry into the building has somehow compromised the scheme, they put a bounty on his head. In New York, Joe is untouchable, but his new foes come from outside the flock, and he’ll need a wing and a prayer to elude their assassins.
With high-stakes action sequences punctuated by laugh out loud humor, The Pigeon is an entertaining caper with nods to vintage crime fiction by masters like Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark. It’s a perfect entry point into David Gordon’s enjoyable Joe the Bouncer series, and a great continuation for returning fans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this violence-packed fifth Joe the Bouncer outing (after 2022's The Wild Life), Gordon delivers a too-busy, if appealingly left-field, crime caper. Joe, who grew up in "a clan of thieves and grifters" and passed through Harvard and the Special Forces, works as a bouncer at a Queens strip club, reading classic literature in his spare time. He's become a valued resource for New York City's Mafia families, and one day Gio, a Mafia boss, taps Joe for a job that at first seems easy: Brooklyn gangster Alonzo is distraught over the theft of his champion racing pigeon, Ramses, valued at over $1 million, and he believes that Wing Chow, a rich pigeon collector, is responsible. But when Joe's burglary of Chow's Upper West Side apartment goes south, he finds himself in the crosshairs of a league of assassins he must fight off—in, of course, hyperviolent fashion—if he wants to survive. Joe is a memorable creation, but Gordon overloads the plot with convoluted character motivations that detract from his gleefully gruesome set pieces. Admirers of humor-leavened antihero capers may enjoy themselves, but this isn't a shining example of the genre.
