Order DUST UP here
(also reviewed)
Order DRIFT here - Read the Review
Dead is dead, but when your blood has been washed off the sidewalk and down into the sewer, you were erased. Dead and gone.
I've spent the first eighteen years of my life trying to look tough. I wanted people to look at me with respect and polite reverence. Of course, some people had it naturally and it never failed to make me miserable until the day I've finally stepped into a boxing gym and "got it". I would stay there for following twelve years. I have a hunch that whoever takes writing as seriously as I once took toughness feel miserable when reading Jon McGoran's Doyle Carrick series because the man is as natural of a storyteller as it gets and his latest novel Dust Up, while not yet transcending the nature of the series, hints at unlimited potential and exciting possibilities.
Doyle Carrick hasn't been looking for trouble this time, trouble found him. Some guy started banging to his door in the middle of the night, got himself shot and died right in front of him. Freaked out by the occurrence and wanting to reassure his girlfriend Nola that they're not in some kind of danger, Doyle starts sniffing around the official investigation and stumbles upon a plethora of details that don't add up. For starters, the victim and his wife (who Doyle saw fleeing the crime scene in terror) were both working for a giant biotech corporation and these companies have a way of finding him and it's never good when they do.
If you've only read Drift before like me, understand that this book has everything and nothing to do with the first volume of the series. Think Dust Up is like Drift's super athletic and good looking younger brother. Not that Drift was any bad, but Jon McGoran has improved leaps and bounds since his first novel. Doyle Carrick has become one of the most interesting series character out there. He's undoubtedly an action hero with a Steve McQueen'esque cool under fire, but he's also very likeable. He's humane without being knightly and resourceful without always being one step ahead of the competition. He's more Martin Riggs than Jack Reacher. Most important, he's not the only interesting character in Dust Up and that is always key to first-person narrated standout novels.
Jon McGoran has a gift to write larger-than-life characters. Even the members of the support cast have a life of their own. Whether they make sense while interacting with Carrick (Mike Warren) or just have vibrant dialogue lines handy (the victim's mother), they all contribute to the story in their own way. The first 120 pages of Dust Up exploded in my face. Up to Doyle Carrick's first plane ride, it's as good as anything I've read this year. But what happens after page 120, right? The novel doesn't take a nose dive or anything like that. Far from that. The Doyle Carrick series are international eco-thrillers and the latter aspect starts taking a whole lot of place.
This is not unheard of for thrillers. Lee Child wrote countless thrillers using this formula: spending the first half of the novel building up a mystery and the second half untangling it. It's more or less what Jon McGoran does in Dust Up and I don't necessarily have a problem with the plot itself. It's sprawling, complex and action packed, but it uses up all the energy of characters McGoran made so goddamn endearing in the first third of his novel. Not every thriller goes that far and wide into its own plot and while I enjoyed it, I knew what I was getting into after reading Drift. Know that Jon McGoran doesn't fuck around with the INTERNATIONAL part in international thriller.
Ecological concerns and to a certain point conspiracy theories take a lot of place in Jon McGoran's novels, so if you don't like these Dust Up might not be for you. It's a novel that means to educate its audience about ecological issues, but it doesn't try to be anything more than what it is: a killer and educational piece of entertainment. Doyle Carrick would've been at home in the eighties where action heroes were fun and boundless, but we're privileged enough to have his story unfolding in the twenty-first century. Dust Up is a very precise thing and it may or may not strike your fancy. I'll tell you though, it's the best damn international thriller I've read in a couple years. That Jon McGoran guy is for real.