Mar 25, 2009 Posted by booktiger on Mar 25, 2009 in Hospitals, Mafia, Requested Reviews, Thrillers, USA | 0 comments

Beat The Reaper – Josh Bazell

A single word came to my head when I finished this book.

Wow.

What a ride. This was a clever combination of graphic violence, black humour, thrills and empathy and it was a story which just kept you on the edge of your seat. For a first novel, it is an explosion from an author who has a fantastic way with words, the ability to craft strong characters and a knack for painting an image which is sometimes too much for the imagination to bear.

The story is about Peter Brown, a doctor working at a frenetically busy New York hospital. The book opens with him getting mugged. But his ability not just to stop the mugger but to literally put him in the hospital suggests that Peter isn’t just your average registrar. Despite verging on exhaustion from the demanding hours of his job, there is a sharpness about him which draws you in. It soon emerges that Peter’s past life is far darker than anyone he works with could have imagined. When he enters the room of a man with terminal cancer and realises that he is recognised, his cover starts to slip. As a hit man for the mob in his previous life, he is in the hospital on witness protection. This guy means certain death to Peter. If Peter allows him to die under his watch, the alarm will have rung and all of those shadows of his past who want to see him dead will be coming for him.

Thus begins a breathless story which jumps from Peter’s musings over the past and what got him to this point and the actual events he is trying to survive through. When put against the backdrop of a busy hospital, as a reader you feel swept along with the sheer pace of this novel. Page turner isn’t a fair description – I was almost ripping at them to see what happened next.

What Josh Bazell has achieved so well in my opinion is the creation of the character of Peter who had such a streak of evil through him and was nevertheless good and sympathetic. It didn’t seem to matter to me what he had done – I wanted him to survive. He was trapped in the moral dilemma of his life, but in it he had allowed himself to truly love someone, as well as question what was right and wrong with the purpose of protecting others from the evil under which he operated. He was the epitome of a hero, but one who was so completely human that his actions made all the more impact. This impression of Peter was made stronger by the fact the book was written in the first person, so you had an intimate relationship with Peter as he fought to keep what he had now gained. I asked Josh how he had managed to paint such a contrast of good an evil in Peter. Josh told me that Peter demonstrated how evil can come so easily to people – especially to Peter – and yet he still battled morally with what he was doing. Josh said that this was something which we could all relate to as humans – a point I completely agree with. Most of us may not exercise the level of evil that Peter was, but if we were pushed to it, how closely would we go? It is an interesting question.

The graphic descriptions in this book really made me cringe at times and stayed in my head even after I had put the book down. This level of violence could put off a reader who was faint at heart, but I felt it fitted with the whole theme and pace of the book. There is no painting over the violence of the mob. In fact, in another question I posed to Josh I asked him how much research he had done about the mob in writing this book and he replied

“I did a fair amount of research, but the thing that felt important to get right was the basis of the mob’s success, which is bone-simple willingness to do awful things to people who work for a living in order to take their money.  A lot of what I was seeing in fictional representations of the mob was victimless crimes and loyalty gained through beneficence.  I suspected the mafia wasn’t really into either of those things, and the facts are out there:  it isn’t.”

The criminal activity associated with the mob is neither romantic nor glamorous. The level of violence is very real, which once again gave this book the quality of a story which could have happened.

I was pleased to discover that Josh is in the midst of writing his next novel, and that Peter will figure in it again. I found myself wanting so much to know what happened to him after the events in Beat the Reaper were over that I couldn’t help but ask. You know an author has done something good when you keep returning to a character and wondering over them in your mind, days or weeks after you have put the book down. I will be glad to see him again.

The final question of Josh was to ask what his plans for the future were. His answer? “Get a life”.

Actually, Josh, I would rather you didn’t if it means you can keep producing novels as good as this one. You can get a life after that.

Rating: 9/10
ISBN: 9780434019236
Publisher: William Heinemann
Date: 2009
Date Finished: 6 March 2009
Pages: 307