DOUBLE VISION

In Bird’s crime thriller, a down-and-out North Carolina cop with a drinking problem inhabits a world of dark menace and self-destruction.

Mike Lunsmann seemingly had it all, just four years prior to the opening of this grim meditation on midlife angst and alcoholism. Back then, he was a hotshot police detective in Craven County, North Carolina,with a wife who loved him and a son who didn’t yet think his dad was a total jerk. That was all washed away after Mike’s descent to the bottom of a Tennessee whiskey bottle. Now he’s a beat cop, and things take a nasty turn when he has a particularly ugly encounter with his family; if he had any hope of repairing their relationship, it’s now effectively gone. Still guided by the “Little Man” in his head “pulling all the wrong levers,” Mike is shot during another alcohol-soaked foray into the night. Awakening in a hospital bed two days later, Mike learns that the gunshot to his arm could have easily killed him. Friendly physician Harold Lasky tells him point-blank that if he doesn’t quit boozing, he’ll die. Sadly for Mike, there are even more immediate threats to his life, because the rifle bullet that pierced his arm just happens to place him in the middle of heinous murder mystery involving four teenagers. The killer’s still out there, and Mike is no shape to track them down. Still, he’s got to try. Over the course of this novel, Bird’s troubled protagonist is beset by demons from within and without. The only question is: Which is worse? That central dilemma helps to propel Bird’s drama forward. Along the way, the author packs his prose with plenty of gumshoe grit: “Next morning Mike awoke with a jackhammer headache and the taste of vomit still fresh at the back of his throat. For a long time he lay still beneath the covers, struggling to arrange whatever happened the night before into some kind of orderly account.” However, it’s his preoccupation with the complexities of his protagonist’s psychological struggles that make this thriller stand out from the pack.

A darkly tragic novel featuring a profoundly flawed antihero.