Wild Thing

This is the second novel by Josh Bazel, and I raved about his first, Beat the Reaper, one of the best books written in 2009. Wild Thing is an equally wonderful ride. There’s an early Tom Robbins quality to his prose, which I find particularly appealing: bold observations, honest revelations, sometimes saucy language but not too much, all built around a fanciful, and possibly plausible story. Bazel actually weaves real science into the story, which he challenges with paper tiger arguments. (I think I’m using that reference correctly.) I started this one evening, and then got up early the next morning to finish it – definitely a book that caught my interest, and just as I could hardly wait for Bazel’s second book, now I’m equally eager for the third.

To start with, meaning going back to Beat the Reaper, the main character is Pietro Brnwa, although here he’s known as Lionel Azimuth. Pietro was a Mafia hit man, who had circumstances go a bit differently than planned. There was a death in a shark tank, and then the loss of his beloved Magdalena Niemerover, events which led him to rat out his Mafia boss and got him into the Federal Witness Protection Program. The Feds paid for this guy to go to medical school, and he became a doctor, and as expected for an assassin and martial arts master, he choses a less than common path as a physician. Despite the history of sociopathic behavior, he is steadfastly ethical in all that he touches. He starts out this book as a cruise ship doctor where he’s just been biding his time, bedding select passengers, and continuing to heal from the loss of Magdalena. Then, he gets hired off the boat by Rec Bill, a megabillionaire, to investigate the possibility of a real life, Loch-Ness-monster-type sighting at White Lake in Ford, Minnesota. Is it real or a scam? Rec Bill sends Brnwa/Azimuth and the lovely paleontologist Violet Hurst to figure it out. Bazel throws in a bizarre and enjoyable group of characters for his sometimes whimsical tale. His biggest surprise character comes at the halfway point, and I literally laughed out loud when the person was revealed. To tell you much more would give away too much. I loved this book.