My Favorite Read of 2009 (so far)

I know, I'm a day early. But I picked up Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper yesterday at Barnes & Noble, suckered in by the cover (along with a faint recollection of hearing about this novel at some point) and sucker-punched by these opening lines:

So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me! Naturally there's a gun.

What follows is a raw, funny, violent thrill ride that blends two great tastes that are rarely tasted together: the medical thriller and the mob novel. (With a little bit of World War II revenge story thrown in for good measure.) You've got the medical- geekspeak of Michael Crichton mixed up with some fine, in-your-face attitude a la Don Winslow or Charlie Huston, sometimes in the same sentence:

I'm thinking too slowly to deal with the Squillante problem, though, so I crush a Moxfane with my fingertips and snort it out of the declivity you can make at the end of your wrist by sticking your thumb out as far from your hand as it will go.

Beat the Reaper is packed with great little weird throwaways like this. It's one of those rare novels where voice is king, and man, what a voice. Bazell also does a neat trick with a split narrative: present day events in the present-tense, and chapter-long flashbacks in past tense... which sounds like a mess, but he pulls it off beautifully. There's no pretentious, ooh-ma-look-at-me writing, but there is plenty of seriously smart writing, the kind that makes writers stop reading for a minute and seethe with jealousy. (At least this writer did.)

If you received any bookstore gift cards over the holidays, I heartily recommend exchanging some of them for this kick-ass novel.