'Fresh Kills' is superb psychological novel
'Fresh Kills' is superb psychological novel

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Published: August 15, 2008

"Fresh Kills” by Bill Loehfelm (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 326 pages, $24.95).

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Junior Sanders, the narrator and main character of Bill Loehfelm's first published novel, is a bitter, angry man — and with good reason.

When he was a kid growing up on Staten Island in the shadow of the massive Fresh Kills landfill, he was beaten regularly by his drunken father. Now, at 31, he drinks too much himself, and his life consists of wandering from one dead-end bartending job to another.

He's worried sick about Julia, his anorexic sister, but can rarely bring himself to call her. He's agonizing over his wife, who just left him. He's occasionally sleeping with his high school sweetheart, Molly Francis, but she belongs to another man. His best friend, Jimmy McGrath, got married and doesn't have time for him anymore.

And on those rare occasions when Junior runs into his father on the street, they end up in a fistfight.

As the book opens, a police officer named Carlo Purvis is banging on Junior's door, rousting him out of bed with Molly. Purvis, who grew up with Junior's dad, and had been the old man's rival in everything from football to courting Junior's mother, has some news.

"Your father's dead. He was shot this morning, not far from the house. ... I'm sorry.”

"No, you're not sorry,” Junior says. "And neither am I. And you know it.”

At first, Junior's only worry is getting the police over their suspicion that he might have gunned down the old man himself, although he does harbor some disappointment that he wasn't the one to do the deed. But then his sister Julia arrives from Boston, asks Junior to help her make the funeral arrangements, and tells him he'll be delivering the eulogy.

She also wants to know what happened to their father, why the shooting has all the earmarks of a mob hit. Telling himself he's doing it for her sake, Junior starts keeping tabs on the police investigation.

Soon it becomes apparent that the investigators — Purvis and a younger cop who has some history with Junior — aren't getting anywhere. So Junior, without understanding why he's bothering, starts digging into the case himself.

His investigation takes him all over Staten Island, giving the reader a tour of crack-ridden housing projects, workingman's bars, littered beaches and sordid teen hangouts. It also produces run-ins with the increasingly irritated police.

The result is perhaps the finest crime fiction debut since Dennis Lehane burst on the scene with "A Drink Before the War” in 1994.

Loehfelm, who grew up on Staten Island but now lives in New Orleans, won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for this superbly written book. The dialogue is pitch-perfect, the prose gritty and lean, and the author creates such a vivid sense of place that Staten Island itself emerges as a major character.

The raw emotion that boils out of Junior as he drags himself through his late father's life makes "Fresh Kills” not just a crime novel but a psychological novel of impressive subtlety and complexity.

— Bruce DeSilva,

The Associated Press