‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking.’ Life is always cheap in noir fiction — but it takes it that step further when the protagonist’s homicidal impulses extend to himself.
The hero of this fast-moving, agreeably violent and perfectly pared-down novella is Joe, a former FBI agent and marine who has reduced what remains of his life to a sliver of deadly purpose. After a gruesome incident in his past, ‘his limit for trauma, a very high limit, had been reached’ and he went completely off his onion. The only method he could devise to stay in the world was ‘to get very small and very quiet and leave no wake’ — and his only raison d’être, in civilian life, is to rescue trafficked children and batter their traffickers to death.
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