THE COLD SPOT by Tom Piccirilli

Bantam Press, 2008, $6.99, 9780553590845

Chase has been a getaway driver all his life. After the death of his parents, he’s been raised by his grandfather Jonah, brought up in a world of thieves and grifters and con artists. He’s a born driver, but maybe not a born criminal. After witnessing his grandfather’s dispatch of one of his own gang, Chase decides its time to get out.

He never counted on falling in love with a cop.

Building something close to a normal life.

And he really didn’t plan on having all of that taken away.

Tom Piccirilli was the man responsible for last year’s wonderful noir masterpiece, The Fever Kill, and here he turns back to the crime genre again with the incredible, The Cold Spot, a brilliantly paced revenge thriller with a genuinely human heart. When we think of getaway drivers, its easy to think of them being akin to a Parker character: cold, uninvolved and professional. Think what they tried to do with Jason Stratham’s character in the movie, The Transporter or, as a far better example, the character of Lennon in Duane Swierczynski’s The Wheel Man. And, sure, Piccirilli makes Chase an absolute professional, but here he fleshes out that archetype by giving him…

… a life.

The first half of the book, taken up as it is with Chase’s life could seem like so much unnecessary window dressing if it weren’t for the fact that Piccirilli knows how important it is to get us to understand his hero. Any good revenge drama relies on us being on the side of the revenger, understanding his psychology. It has to be more complex than some archetypal revenge fantasy a-la Deathwish if we to truly feel anything. And Piccirilli is a master at helping us to empathise with his cast. He’s been at this game a long time and even his most despicable creations seem to have been at least comprehensible to the reader. But Chase… he must be a good man at heart for this to work. We have to understand him beyond his role as Getaway Driver, and by seeing him leave the life, fall in love, build a normal existence… we are on his side. We know what he has worked for to have all of this. He has given up many things, adjusted his world view, made sacrifices and ultimately – despite his past – he deserves this quiet, peaceful, beautiful new life.

So when it is snatched away by a gang of criminals with itchy trigger fingers, we understand his rage and frustration and loss. We are right there with him. We can feel the sense of, why did this have to happen? Why wasn’t I there to stop this?

And we understand why Chase can only turn to one man for help in finding the cold spot, that place inside of him that will help take revenge like he was taking care of business. We understand why he turns to his grandfather Jonah, the man he took such great pains to leave behind in the first place.

The relationship between Chase and Jonah that takes up much of the second half of the book is a complex and unsettling double act. Jonah represents a dark side of Chase that he doesn’t want have to confront, but is something he must control and use if he is to heal those wounds inside of him. As Chase constantly walks the line between the life he wants and the life that Jonah offers, we find the central conflict of the book, and indeed of any good revenge drama: will the act of revenge change our character beyond recognition? Turn him into the very thing he is reacting against?

It’s a tension that Piccirilli exploits beautifully in the last third of the book without offering any overly easy answers or guarantees of salvation. Indeed anyone who’s read Piccirilli’s work before will know that he doesn’t offer guarantees in his stories. And that uncertainty is what keeps those pages turning.

Throw into the mix some larger themes that set the groundwork for further books in the series. As the story draws to a close, we find some answers about Chase’s life that change everything we thought we knew. We find hints of a darkness that could push him even further over the edge. This is the ideal of a series; resolve the major questions, but leave enough hanging that readers will want to follow you onto the next novel.

The Cold Spot is a gripping and powerful novel from an author who makes fans out of almost everyone who reads his work. The prose hums with a visceral energy that’ll keep you turning those pages. I finished it fast, thought about it for days afterwards. And really, there’s no better recommendation than simply: read this book. But be warned: once you hit that last page, you’ll be dying to read 2009’s The Coldest Mile.

THE FEVER KILL By Tom Picirilli

Creeping Hemlock Press, 2007, 978-0976921745, $16.95,

Hands up, straight out of the box, let me admit I have more than a soft spot for Piccirilli’s work. In 2006, I first read Headstone City which was not only a perfectly formed chiller, but also an excellent story about organised crime. I went back to read A Choir of Ill Children, which is one of the most insane horror novels – and its real horror, horrors of the mind rather than simple ghoulish grotesquery (although there is plenty of grotesquery, albeit much of it oddly beautiful and touching compared to the terrors of the everyday; something that only Southern gothic seems to able to achieve).

The Fever Kill is probably the first “straight” crime novel from Piccirilli, a tale of an undercover cop who’s finally snapped. A man who must face up not only to the mistakes he’s made on the job, but the mistakes he’s made his whole life. And the mistakes his own father may have made.

It’s a doom laden tale, with a galloping sense of the inevitable; from the moment we meet Crease, we know that his tale can’t end well. He’s a man who’s seen and done things that would have killed anyone else long ago. And maybe that would have been a mercy.

In the best noir tradition, The Fever Kill has a nightmare intensity. Emotions are ramped, and guilt seeps through the soul of every character we encounter. Of course, it is Crease’s guilt that pervades the novel most, and is finally personified in the undeniably creepy form of Teddy. This is a theme that runs through Piccirilli’s work – the idea of the man haunted by something from his past that is personified either on some higher plane or in his own mind. In many of his other books we are uncertain whether these hauntings are real or not; in The Fever Kill, we can be fairly certain that is a purely sign of Crease’s gradual unravelling. This guilt is, of course, natural to noir, as is the eventual confrontation with both its root cause and its effects. It is in these confrontations – often bloody and terrifying – that The Fever Kill truly grabs the reader by the throat.

But what the novel covers most effectively – and perhaps unexpectedly – is the relationship between father and son; what we hope to pass on to our offspring versus what we really give them.

Crease’s own father seems a natural jumping on point for Piccirilli’s exploration of this relationship. After all this was a seemingly good man who was eventually implicated not only in corruption but in the death of a young girl. Did he kill her? Did he take the money intended for her ransom? Is it the guilt over this that eventually leads to his blood and vomit soaked death on a street of the town of Hangtree?

But it is not the father who carries this guilt throughout the years so much as it is Crease himself who does so on the old man’s behalf. This guilt for his father’s actions explains Crease’s need to leave his old town and try to establish another kind of identity far away; the kind of identity that brings him back full circle to face the truth about his father, and about himself.

Crease’s relationship with his own son – a bullying eight year old with a bubbling anger he could only have inherited from his father - mirrors something of this. Crease wants to pass only the best of humanity on to his son, but with his own guilt and the very nature of the life he leads (that of an undercover agent in an organised crime family) as well as the raging fever that burns inside him, it seems he’s doomed to failure. In this relationship – one conducted long distance, awkwardly and painfully – we truly understand the messed up nature of Crease’s existence.

In his introduction, Ken Bruen claims that Piccirilli can jump genres on the spin of a dime, writing like he’s been doing this kind of thing all his life. And he has, in one sense or another, been working towards this kind of tale. A pulp paperback for the modern world. A noir novel with bite, imbued with the raging fever of the title. It’s not just a simple tale of revenge, although you can read it that way if you want. Piccirilli is an author with style and smarts to spare, and he’s jumped easily from being one of this reviewer’s favourite horror writers to one of his favourite noir writers.

The Fever Kill is one hell of punch to the gut. A smart, literate and terrifying noir nightmare, it confirms Piccirilli as among one of the best modern genre writers; an author who takes chances with his theme, character and style to deliver intriguingly complex and thrilling novels that can be read on multiple levels.

Russel D McLean for crimescenescotland.com, 17/12/2007

Buy The Fever Kill from Amazon.com

Buy The Fever Kill from Amazon.co.uk