Wild Thing

This is the second novel by Josh Bazel, and I raved about his first, Beat the Reaper, one of the best books written in 2009. Wild Thing is an equally wonderful ride. There’s an early Tom Robbins quality to his prose, which I find particularly appealing: bold observations, honest revelations, sometimes saucy language but not too much, all built around a fanciful, and possibly plausible story. Bazel actually weaves real science into the story, which he challenges with paper tiger arguments. (I think I’m using that reference correctly.) I started this one evening, and then got up early the next morning to finish it – definitely a book that caught my interest, and just as I could hardly wait for Bazel’s second book, now I’m equally eager for the third.

To start with, meaning going back to Beat the Reaper, the main character is Pietro Brnwa, although here he’s known as Lionel Azimuth. Pietro was a Mafia hit man, who had circumstances go a bit differently than planned. There was a death in a shark tank, and then the loss of his beloved Magdalena Niemerover, events which led him to rat out his Mafia boss and got him into the Federal Witness Protection Program. The Feds paid for this guy to go to medical school, and he became a doctor, and as expected for an assassin and martial arts master, he choses a less than common path as a physician. Despite the history of sociopathic behavior, he is steadfastly ethical in all that he touches. He starts out this book as a cruise ship doctor where he’s just been biding his time, bedding select passengers, and continuing to heal from the loss of Magdalena. Then, he gets hired off the boat by Rec Bill, a megabillionaire, to investigate the possibility of a real life, Loch-Ness-monster-type sighting at White Lake in Ford, Minnesota. Is it real or a scam? Rec Bill sends Brnwa/Azimuth and the lovely paleontologist Violet Hurst to figure it out. Bazel throws in a bizarre and enjoyable group of characters for his sometimes whimsical tale. His biggest surprise character comes at the halfway point, and I literally laughed out loud when the person was revealed. To tell you much more would give away too much. I loved this book.

Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell

I’m in the midst of a 48-hour travel fog/jet lag/confusion/stupor (a state of mind with which EC Don is intimately familiar), so I hope I do this very good book justice. This is a first novel by a medical resident although one who I gather is a couple years older than your usual post-grad doc. The story begins as the intern is on his way to the hospital in the wee hours when a guy tries to mug him, not knowing this man in scrubs not only does not have any money and does not have any drugs (beyond his personal stash that he will need for the next couple days), but he is a former mafia hit man (wake up, Charlie Stella, you’ll like this one). The resident puts the guy down and then later encounters him in the ER -- funny stuff. Peter Brown/Pietra Brnwa is the protagonist who was raised by his grandparents who were apparently holocaust survivors, and he gets pulled into mob service when he avenges their murder, and when his best buddy’s father takes over as surrogate father. After some years as an active hitman, he enters the witness protection program and goes to med school, which he is paying for via the money he has earned from the hits. The bad guys figure out who and where he is, so the chase is on. Wait until you read the scene in the shark tank. What makes this book stand out is the excellent narrative – fast, well-written, and I hate to use the word gripping, but it is. I thought the medical writing was as clear and honest as anything I’ve ever seen, at least from a clinical and (psychiatry term) countertransference perspective. The book jacket indicated that Bazell is writing his second novel, and I look forward to that one. This one, for our genre, comes with my 5-star recommendation.

WC Don