The Midnight Road [Mass Market Paperback]

There are two writers extant who can bring me to tears, to real
laughter, and sometimes, to screaming in frustration or anger. One
of them is Tom Piccirilli. When I first picked up The Midnight
Road, I remembered, at once, the very first line of the book from a
little taste given at the back of his last novel, The Dead Letters:
"Flynn remembered the night of his death more clearly than any
other in his life." Wow! And, of course I read through that little
taste and decided Ihad to stay alive for another year or so to
finally read the entire book. Which I have. Twice. Wow!

This is the story of Flynn, a forty year old man who carries enough
grief and pain and regret to fuel an entire city. Everyone he loved
died, but the worst death was that of his brother, thirty years
gone. Flynn still drives the Charger in which is brother and
girlfriend met their ends. He is a deeply flawed, deeply empathetic
man who works for Child Protection Services just to try and ease or
prevent yet more suffering. Too many people think that a guy
working for CPS is a potential pederast, and don't look kindly on
him. In trying to save a child and her naked and scarred autistic brother who was locked in a
cage from their nutsoid gun-toting mom, Flynn gets to die. For
twenty-eight minutes. (not a record!) After that, everything goes
downhill. People start falling dead around him, and the cops think
he's involved. Which he is, but not in the way they think. So he
has to find out what's going on.

Good story. Terrific story, in fact, studded with all kinds of
oddities. Like the ghost dog who died along with Flynn and then
came back to haunt him, still wearing plastic booties and a
sweater. Like Flynn's boss, Sierra, whose face is full of
reconstructive plastic. But the best thing, the very best, is the
writing itself and all those terrible emotions it conjures up.
There is something so very natural, so unforced and lacking
contrivance about Piccarilli's writing that you just fall into it.
You know that this is real: this is how people would think and talk
and act. This is how it would go down in the world off the page.
This is not a writer inventing stuff, this is somebody telling you
how it is. It is that simple, and that amazingly good.

And Piccirilli is really funny. Don't know why more people don't
respond to that outrageous humour which is sometimes very subtle,
sometimes very black, and sometimes absolutely silly. It gives a
wonderful balance to all of the pain and misery which his
characters have to endure.

And this is why his writings can make me cry and laugh and steam
with anger. He has that very rare ability to encite real emotional
response in the reader, to render his characters so very alive
that they walk off the page and into your thoughts. You may finish
the book and put it down, but you will never forget it.

Tom Piccirilli peoples his novels with the strange and eccentric characters whom we all know in real life. It's a gift few authors can match. He guides us expertly through their oddities and into a very real world, the one existing outside our own doors, and we're forced to wonder: how am I so fortunate to not have experienced this very thing?

THE MIDNIGHT ROAD is no exception. It flows expertly from the powerful opening scene, and in the end closes by echoing not just themes from the beginning of the novel, but from the beginning of the story--which is not the same thing.

Dark but not disturbing. Thoroughly engaging. Fast paced, but not neck breaking. Woven together with all the right words and none of those extraneous, useless words that can often be found littering the pages of other books. I can't say THE MIDNIGHT ROAD is just the latest in a line of increasingly powerful, poetic, and intriguing novels; that would understate things. Piccirilli has gotten better with every book, more subtle and more straight-forward and more direct and more accessible.

I highly recommend it.

Flynn may be the luckiest man alive. If, that is, your definition of "lucky" includes being harassed by a dead talking dog and having the folks around you dropping dead at an alarming rate.

The Midnight Road is a great novel full of twists and turns and blind curves. Piccirilli is a maniac behind the wheel and he's got the pedal pressed all the way to the floor from the opening lines right through to the final, breathtaking conclusion.

For those who are already fans, we've got Piccirilliesque oddball characters trapped in bizarre situations, trying to bust through the wall, but on this outing, the man has taken his usual fluid style, dipped it in gasoline and set it aflame. For new fans, what are you waiting for?

This book, like the ones that've come before, only solidifies Piccirilli's position as absolutely one of the best crime writers working today.
That's all folks, I've gushed enough (never!). Buy the book, fasten your seatbelts and don't blink. You don't want to miss a word of this one.

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