In David Gordon's diabolically imaginative new thriller, The Bouncer,
nothing and no one is as expected--from a vial of yellow fragrance to a
gangster who moonlights in women's clothes.
Joe Brody is just your average Dostoevsky-reading, Harvard-expelled
strip club bouncer who has a highly classified military history and
whose best friend from Catholic school happens to be head mafioso Gio
Caprisi. FBI agent Donna Zamora, the best shot in her class at Quantico,
is a single mother stuck at a desk manning the hotline. Their storylines
intersect over a tip from a cokehead that leads to a crackdown on Gio's
strip joint in Queens and Joe's arrest--just one piece of a city-wide
sweep aimed at flushing out anyone who might have a lead on the various
terrorists whose photos are hanging on the wall under Most Wanted.
Outside the jailhouse, the Fed and the bouncer lock eyes, as Gordon
launches them both headlong into a nonstop plot that goes from back-road
gun show intervention to high-stakes perfume heist and manages to touch
everyone from the CIA to the Flushing Triads. Beneath it all lurks a
sinister criminal mastermind whose manipulations could cause chaos on a
massively violent scale.
For readers who like a heavy dose of fun with their murder, this is
crime fiction at its freshest, from a virtuoso of the "darkly comic,
stylish literary thriller" (Associated Press).
