Alex Trotter is a brand new writer for me. I found this reduced in the Waterstones sale a few weeks ago and thought it sounded interesting.
Box and _________ (that’s his name in the book- a blank space underlined) are muscle for hire, walking the streets of an unnamed city, looking for hands to break and debts to collect. When not breaking hands and other assorted body parts, they play poker with a motley crew of supporting cast, including an aspiring writer and a private detective and his crippled sidekick. At some point in the story, things turn weird, Box gets a crush on a target they’ve been given, bodies start piling up, and things get even weirder.
It’s all very literary even though it plays with all the tropes of noir fiction. There’s the femme fatales, the hired goons, the private eyes, and plenty of killing. There’s even suggestions of genre hopping.
I’ll be honest and say I’m not entirely certain if I understood what the hell was going on by the end of it, but I had fun reading it, and that’s the primary objective of a fiction novel IMHO.
One of the reviews on the back says it’s written in a sinuous style, and I can’t think of a better word so I’ll go with that. The style of writing is really what sets this novel apart. It appears simple but slithers around the plot and you have to hunt for what’s really happening.
I don't think I've read anything quite like this recently, more for the style than the content. If i see another novel by the man, will I pick it up? Probably. As I said, I enjoyed this a lot even if I'm not 100% certain what actually happened. The writing is excellent, the apparently simple prose playing peekaboo with multiple layers of storytelling.
A solid start to the year by all metrics that matter to me.
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