Tear It Down

October 8, 2018
Thriller Award winner Petrie’s gripping fourth Peter Ash novel (after 2018’s Light It Up) takes the war vet to Memphis at the behest of girlfriend June Cassidy. June is concerned that her friend Wanda Wyatt, a former war photographer who’s even more psychologically damaged than Peter, is in danger. Peter soon ascertains that’s the case when Wanda’s ramshackle home is bulldozed by a garbage truck. Wanda refuses to vacate the ruined house even after a nighttime machine gun assault. But what do her attackers, two ex-con brothers, want? Meanwhile, 15-year-old homeless blues guitarist Eli Bell gets roped into a disastrous jewelry store heist by some fellow wastrels and goes on the run. When Eli steals Peter’s pickup truck at gunpoint, the inveterate do-gooder Peter decides to help the imperiled kid anyway. While logic sometimes takes a holiday as these dual stories unspool, and the finale’s high-speed car chase strains credulity, there’s no denying that Petrie is hell on wheels at mounting lethal action face-offs. A close cousin to Lee Childs’s more analytical Jack Reacher, Peter Ash is one of today’s more exciting action heroes. Author tour. Agent: Barbara Poelle, Irene Goodman Literary.

November 1, 2018
Combat veteran Peter Ash (Light It Up, 2018, etc.) finds himself protecting both a threatened photojournalist and a young homeless man who may be a blues prodigy in the fourth entry in this series.Sensing his restlessness, Ash's girlfriend sends him off to Memphis where her friend Wanda, an African-American photojournalist, has just moved into a new home and is receiving messages warning her to move. In the midst of dealing with this situation, Ash has his lovingly restored '68 Chevy pickup hijacked by a teenage boy who has found himself hunted by the local crime kingpin. What with Ash trying to repair Wanda's home after a dump truck is driven into it, save the young boy from the crook who's out for him, and identify Wanda's enemies, he has his hands full. And accordingly, the book has too much going on. Each of the individual plots is engaging, but they take too long to dovetail, and one would have sufficed. But then almost all thrillers are written too long these days. (Authors would do well to check out the concision of classic American pulp, like the kind that was once published by the paperback imprint Gold Medal.) Also, there is an unavoidable sense of the white guy come to the aid of the black people with Ash's heroics. But the book's heart is in the right place, and Ash is an appealing character, though one who, if the series is to grow, needs sharper definition (and also a sharper tongue) in the entries to come. But the book is never a slog, and it's easy to imagine the series will become even more pleasurable as it finds its footing.This is an appealing outing which hits the right balance between tough and compassionate.

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November 1, 2018
Somebody drove a dump truck full tilt into an old house on the fringes of Memphis. Days later someone blasted the house with an assault weapon. These events engage the attention of Petrie's series hero, Peter Ash, an Iraq War vet who, like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, wants a mission. His attempts to discover the reason for the attacks lead him into confrontations with a gang boss and his gunsel, a few people who are still smarting about losing the Civil War, and a troubled black musician who calls Peter Saltine. Petrie's prose, vivid and almost tactile, is at its loving best in these jazz interludes, writing of a sound spontaneous, like water welling up from a spring. Readers may wish Petrie had improvised a little more with some of the genre tropes he employs, like the marine buddy who makes like an insult comic and strikes like a snake, or the foul-mouthed, forever-exasperated girlfriend mad about the boy. But this thriller is all about the thrills, and there are plenty of them here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2018

PTSD-afflicted veteran Peter Ash heads to Memphis to help photographer and war correspondent Wanda Wyatt and has his pickup truck hijacked at gunpoint by a likable young street musician in trouble. Fourth in a series that opened with The Drifter, winner of the ITW Thriller and Barry awards for Best First Novel.

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