DRY HEAT

An Arizona teenager’s life becomes marred by betrayal and violence in this novel.

Joy’s tale chronicles the adolescent years of Joey Blade, a high school senior football star in Phoenix. His plucky ex-girlfriend Mallory Stewart encourages a reluctant Joey to go to Los Angeles to check out colleges for a sports scholarship despite discouraging words from his mother, Callie, and Vietnam veteran father, Dutch, who prefer he remain with the family’s lucrative engine rebuilding business. A bright future studying writing beckons. But first is a millennium-eve bonfire party where Joey celebrates his 18th birthday with new girlfriend Wendy Chang and her provocative pot dealer, TJ Grimes. What’s intended as a mostly innocent night turns solemn when Mallory reveals her pregnancy and the bonfire explodes, sending fiery embers into the crowd. Joey, Wendy, and TJ speed away. Unfortunately, after they are taunted by Wendy’s ex-flame Lawrence Darville on the road, TJ pulls a gun in a subsequent police shootout that finds Joey, the driver, tossed in jail. TJ disappears, and the ensuing months revolve around Joey dealing with the court proceedings, rekindling things with Mallory, and quelling the melodrama surrounding Wendy, who lied to the police about the gun’s owner. The effort to find TJ to clear Joey is expedited thanks to drug lord Chico Torres, whom Joey met in jail. In Joy’s novel, Joey emerges as a fully developed character to root for. His path to freedom doesn’t come easily, spanning the story’s second half, which depicts him as an adult with unfinished business. The author is careful never to allow the tale’s hard-won momentum to dissipate and is masterful at keeping all the plot pieces in motion as they play out. The raw, gritty lives of these teens are portrayed in an unadorned yet highly charged narrative in which trouble is plentiful. Joy is distinctly talented at characterization, especially with the convincing life of Joey, whose future is placed in jeopardy after some ill-conceived decisions. The author’s prose is crisply paced and lively. As he demonstrated in previous novels, Joy has a firm grip on how effective a solid combination of a strong storyline and a core cast of vivid, anchoring characters can be in a tale where youthful innocence becomes tarnished by consequences.

A rousing, suspenseful crime drama with memorable characters.