Welcome to Cooper by Tariq Ashkanani

Published by Thomas & Mercer on October 1, 2021

Cooper is a desperate, desolate town in Nebraska, a place where people live when they are out of options. For being a nothing town, Cooper is a hotbed of criminal activity. Much of it is controlled by a gangster in Omaha named Marchenko, who also controls a local police detective named Joe Finch.

Joe is partnered with a new arrival in Cooper, a former DC detective who made drug busts, stole the drugs, and used them recreationally with his girlfriend before she died. Thomas Levine saved his skin by giving evidence against his partner in DC, who was selling his share of the stolen drugs. With help he probably didn’t deserve, Thomas found a new home in Cooper. History repeats itself as Thomas discovers that his new partner is corrupt.

Joe commits a murder, frames Thomas for it, and uses the threat of Thomas’ arrest to coerce Thomas’ assistance in an armed robbery. The man Joe kills may have murdered a woman whose eyes were gouged out — the latest in a series of similar murders — but Thomas comes to believe that the murder victim wasn’t the killer at all. Thomas attempts to find the true killer while dealing with his corrupt partner and a state cop who threatens to expose Thomas’ crimes.

The novel is written in the first person, although it isn’t always narrated by the same person. Most of it is narrated by Thomas, but the shifting perspectives add another layer of interest as the reader tries to identify each storyteller. Only at the novel’s end do we understand the significance of the narration.

Welcome to Cooper initially struck me as an attempt to emulate the classic noir of the 1930s to 1950s, but this is noir on steroids. The story is gruesome and gory at times, but not particularly graphic. Life is bleak for Thomas. He remind us of his darkness more often than is necessary. He blames himself for his girlfriend’s death and for all the other tragedy that comprises his life. Near the novel’s end, he seeks a form of redemption but Tariq Ashkanani doesn’t give Thomas the kind of life that leaves room for a lightened soul.

At its best, Welcome to Cooper is the story of two damaged loners who briefly find each other. We don’t see much of Cooper — this isn’t an atmospheric novel — but we’re told that the town is pit, a haven for the lost and abandoned. A bartender named Mary illustrates the kind of life that condemns someone to Cooper. Mary befriends Thomas, almost against his wishes. They form the kind of momentary connection that can change a life just by suggesting possibilities, even if the possibilities will never be realized.

Welcome to Cooper grew on me. I wasn’t expecting much after the first chapter, but as the story accumulates force, it becomes impossible to look away from the crash and burn that the reader anticipates.

Ashkanani’s characterization of Mary and Thomas is the novel’s strength. The key villain, a killer who Thomas ends up chasing, is an underdeveloped stereotype of evil, but the relentlessly bleak plot is compelling in a cringeworthy way. “Life sucks, then you die” isn’t the philosophy that drives bestsellers, but it describes the reality of certain noir novels, including Welcome to Cooper. Yet the novel’s ending, while far from happy, does suggest the slightest bit of hope for a better future for those who survive the present, the possibility that even the worst villains might feel empathy under the right circumstances, and the recognition that connections with other people, even fleeting connections, are all that really matter.

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