The Wild Life by David Gordon

Published by Mysterious Press on April 26, 2022

David Gordon’s books about Joe Brody are all kinds of fun. Joe is a military sniper turned criminal who tries to keep the shadiest side of his life hidden from the FBI agent he sleeps with. She knows he’s a criminal but doesn’t want to know the details. Joe is employed by a crime family, but all the crime bosses in the New York City area occasionally get together and hire Joe to perform a task that serves the public good. Joe’s job is essentially to make New York City a safer place for criminals and honest people alike.

Joe chased terrorists during the first novels in the Joe the Bouncer series, a contrivance that was getting old. In The Wild Life, Gordon diversifies Joe’s services. Someone has been making prstitutes disappear. The crime bosses feel protective of working girls, particularly when they work in establishments that are under their protection. A Romanian woman who worked in a dungeon was befriended by Joe’s employer before her dead body washed up. While the plot broadly involves political corruption, Joe’s concern is limited to the working women who end up chained to a wall until they meet their demise.

Joe’s detective work brings him close to the killer relatively quickly. Gordon employs a bit of misdirection as to the killer’s identity, but the universe of possible suspects is quite limited. This is a character-driven action story more than a whodunit.

Joe has fun pretending to be a person of wealth so he can hobnob with suspects of wealth. The impersonation is fun for the reader as well, as it gives Joe a chance to be sneaky and snarky. The action is typical movie fare, highlighted by a motorcycle chase and a few brawls.

The plot of The Wild Life isn’t particularly creative. As a middle-tier action novel, it doesn’t need to be. I suspect readers stick to this series because Joe is easy to like, the kind of morally flawed character whose virtues outweigh his questionable sense of morality. He enjoys reading, which makes him a sympathetic killer. And if he kills someone, the victim probably has it coming, at least in Joe’s calculus of good and evil.

Joe’s awkward relationship with the FBI agent adds interest to the story, as does the stereotyped collection of underworld leaders who, apart from running criminal organizations, share familiar qualities of older people who come together to play cards and gripe about younger people. The exception is Yelena, a younger Russian woman who took over her criminal organization in an earlier novel and who also has an awkward relationship with Joe — awkward for Joe, at any rate. The entire cast of characters and the unique nature of Joe as an underworld enforcer who does jobs that the police should be doing make the entire series enjoyable, even if no particular entry in the series stands out as better than the others.

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Against the Law by David Gordon

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on May 25, 2021

The third book in the Joe the Bouncer series returns Joe Brody to the fight against terrorism. Joe is a former Special Forces guy who has conquered addictions and other demons. Now he works as a strip club bouncer who does freelance work for Gio, the Mafia boss who owns the club. His freelance work so far has advanced the New York underworld’s war on terror, a war it fights because terrorism is bad for business. And because doing occasional favors for the FBI and CIA has its perks.

Much of Against the Law will be familiar to series readers. Joe the criminal continues his flirtation with Donna the FBI agent, who continues her distrust of the CIA agent to whom she was once married. Joe continues something more than a flirtation with Yelena the Russian criminal. Donna’s mother continues her friendship with Joe’s grandmother. All of those characters play important roles in the novel.  As one might hope and expect in a series, a couple of these relationships change by the time the novel ends. Even a subplot involving Gio’s marital problems, exacerbated by proclivities that he tried to hide from his wife, appears to be resolved.

The story begins in Afghanistan, where Joe has traveled to kill Zahir, a nemesis he has seen before. Zahir has been smuggling high quality heroin into New York by unknown means. Zahir seems to be trying to corner the New York drug market with better heroin than the locals are supplying. Zahir then funnels the profits to terrorist cells. New York’s criminal organizations don’t appreciate foreign competition. Gio and the other crime czars are paying Joe a half million dollars to take out Zahir.

When Joe’s mission doesn’t go as planned, the plot detours to a corporation called Wildwater (think Halliburton combined with the company formerly known as Blackwater). The CIA is in bed with Wildwater, which is in bed with Zahir and with a psychopathic military contractor named Toomey. Toomey’s take on the war against terror is to inflict some terror of his own, bringing about the clash of civilizations for which people on the far right long, provided they are not personally inconvenienced by the clash. All of those entities in the same bed makes a predictable mess. It falls to Joe and his underworld buddies, with an assist from Donna, to clean up the mess and once again save New York from imminent disaster.

This book seems to bring to an end to a three-book arc, while leaving room to move forward with the development of certain characters and their relationships. While the familiar characters are likeable, the familiar plot — Joe takes on terrorists, fights and kills and survives — has become a bit predictable. I have enjoyed all the Joe the Bouncer novels, but I enjoyed this one less because it seemed like a book I had read twice before. I hope David Gordon moves Joe away from terrorism plots and toward something fresh and original in the next novel. Still, I look forward to reading the next one because Joe the Bouncer remains a unique and engaging criminal protagonist.

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The Hard Stuff by David Gordon

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on July 2, 2019

This is the second book to feature Joe Brody, following The Bouncer. The story begins with Joe helping his boss, Gio Caprisi, clean up a loose ends from the first novel, a cleaning job that leaves a trail of dead bodies (not Joe’s fault, really). That chapter recaps the first novel so The Hard Stuff can easily be read as a standalone. I nevertheless recommend reading The Bouncer first, because it is — like The Hard Stuff — a fun book.

Joe’s efforts in the early pages invite the attention of an attractive FBI agent named Donna, who can’t decide whether to arrest Joe or take him to bed. She was in the same quandary by the end of The Bouncer. Joe knows what he wants to do, but since a hookup seems unlikely, he instead goes to bed with his Russian friend Yalena, another returning character from the first book. Yalena cracks safes and, like Joe, has a talent for killing people. Odd, then, that they are both such likable characters.

The plot, as in the first novel, has Joe thwarting terrorists. He has to do something redemptive, after all, or readers might not want to give him their time. The terrorists have come to the US to sell a large quantity of drugs that they stole overseas. They want to be paid in diamonds. That doesn’t make much sense, but never mind. The book is fun; it doesn’t need to make sense.

Joe’s mission is to steal a bunch of diamonds, use them to buy the drugs, then steal back the diamonds, all to thwart the terrorists. It might be easier just to steal the drugs and/or kill the terrorists, but that wouldn’t be as entertaining.

Crime fans always enjoy a well-planned jewel heist. That caper is followed by various armed confrontations, chase scenes, fights, and light-hearted mayhem. Joe’s relationships with Yalena and Donna add a touch of sex and potential romance, while action and snappy dialog keep the story moving at a suitable pace. Collateral characters, including Joe’s mobbed-up mom and his cross-dressing boss, contribute to the fun. The two novels in this series push all the right buttons for crime fiction fans, making The Hard Stuff easy to recommend.

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The Bouncer by David Gordon

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on August 7, 2018

The Bouncer is a fun, fast-moving, light-hearted thriller. The premise is that the FBI and the NYPD are coming down hard on criminal organizations in New York because their anti-terrorism details can’t catch any actual terrorists, so going after organized crime (on the contrived theory that their money laundering and drug dealing somehow abets terrorism) is the next best thing. To get back to business as usual, mob boss Gio Caprisi offers to help the FBI catch terrorists in exchange for leaving his businesses alone. That sounds like something that could easily happen, given the uneasy history of coziness between the FBI and the Mafia.

Meanwhile, Joe Brody is working as a bouncer at one of Gio’s places. He gets involved with a robbery (ripping off some arms dealers) that goes wrong, but he manages to rescue a fellow criminal from the clutches of an attractive FBI agent. That gets him invited to help with another caper, this time stealing a sample of a new perfume from a vault. Or at least that’s what he thinks he’s stealing. That crime also goes wrong in a way that proves there is no honor among thieves.

Bouncers have a good bit of down time when the strippers aren’t on stage. Joe uses his time productively by committing crimes, evading law enforcement, and reading classic literature. Eventually, Gio has him take on some terrorists.

David Gordon writes action scenes in a cinematic style. He gives Joe the kind of personality that a criminal protagonist should have — flawed, a bit beyond concerns about society’s norms, but fundamentally decent when it counts. Other characters, particularly the FBI agent who gets under Joe’s skin, have enough personality to make them interesting.

This novel is the first in the “Joe the Bouncer” series. Fans of intelligent, action-driven crime novels will likely enjoy it. I look forward to reading the second installment.

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