THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE
By Michael Wiley
Minotaur, $24.99, 288 pages
LET IT RIDE
By John McFetridge
Minotaur, $24.99, 304 pages
Michael Wiley’s “The Bad Kitty Lounge” was selected by the Poisoned Pen Bookstore as a Hardboiled Crime Club pick, and it isn’t hard to see why. The first murder is of a nun. She is strangled, and on her stomach is a tattoo of a cat, its back arched and its tail raised. Beneath the image are scrawled the words “Bad Kitty.”
After that, it gets really nasty.
If you like tough thrillers, this is for you. Private detective Joe Kozmarski, a former Chicago police officer, plunges into the hunt for the killer of Judy Terrano, a nun with a past that stretches into the political rage of the 1960s and the burning of the Bad Kitty Lounge, a notorious bar of that era. As a one-time musician puts it, “We played in some wild joints over the years but we never played in another joint as wild as the Bad Kitty. The place was hot as a wire.”
The background of the dead Judy Terrano is provided in detail by former hooker Louise Johnson, who isn’t surprised to hear that Terrano became pregnant but notes that she is grateful the child was a boy.
“The world couldn’t handle another Judy Terrano,” she explains, and adds that it was just as well the bar was burned down. “If [it] hadn’t, I would have died a long time ago … but I would have died smiling.”
It turns out that the notorious Bad Kitty Lounge is the key to an old and bloody mystery, the building having been deliberately set on fire by a son of the wealthy Stone family who owned it. Louise Johnson is the next to to die but far from the last. There are beatings and what seems like a hailstorm of killings and more beatings, many inflicted on the indefatigable detective as he unearths the racism of the city’s past and hears its history from William DuBuclet, a man in his 90s who recounts how his son was shot by police as he lay in bed with his pregnant girlfriend - who was Judy Terrano.
Mr. Wiley writes at as fast a clip as his plot moves, and his reader hurtles from one scene of bloody violence to another.
What is surprising is that the detective survives the events of the last frantic chapters that range from blazing guns to the damage inflicted by a glass pot of boiling coffee flung into the face of the killer.
It’s hard-boiled, all right, and you have to be somewhat hard-boiled to enjoy it, but in the brief intervals between violence, it effectively tells a brutal story. It’s a relief when the killer is finally riddled with bullets. He is so difficult to finish off that it reminds you of closing scenes in the sci-fi movie “The Terminator” when the robot’s hand continues to threaten although the rest of him is dead.
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If you were put off by the violence of “Bad Kitty,” you will have a lot more trouble with John McFetridge’s “Let It Ride.” Its author is a television writer whose career is described by his publishers as “defined by sink or swim immersion” in the school of dramatic crime writing that has produced television series dominated by terse, obscenity-laced dialogue and explosions of violence.
The plot amounts to a collection of vignettes drawn from a street world of bottom-feeder people who use racism as an excuse for petty and mindlessly brutal crime. On the side of law and order are detectives so beyond hard-boiled that they make a mockery of what they do. Mr. McFetridge reportedly spent his childhood listening to tales of drug raids and homicide investigations from family members who were gang task force detectives. But it didn’t teach him how to write. Punctuating almost every sentence with four-letter words does not carry the weight of the kind of tough but crisp prose written by Elmore Leonard or Joseph Wambaugh, who could convey darkness and desperation with harshness and accuracy but who never resorted to the raw, slam-bang style of Mr. McFetridge.
This is not so much a book as an outline for a television show on how the mean streets operate. It has all the ingredients.
There is Vernard “Get” McGetty, returned from a stint in Afghanistan to deal drugs and join up with JT, leader of the Saints of Hell, an Ontario biker gang with plans to move up, probably because there’s no way the members can move down. For feminine interest, there is the foul-mouthed Sunitha. Her career in crime has progressed from working massage parlors to robbing them. Her ambition is to rob the bikers of millions of dollars in gold destined for a cocaine buy. In the end, it seems nobody wins, although a few get what is undoubtedly coming to them. Despite the potential drama of its content, the book captures neither interest nor imagination.
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
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