A Better Goodbye

September 28, 2015
This visceral, gritty noir takes place on the seedy fringes of modern Hollywood. Nick Pafko, who was a boxer until he killed an opponent and derailed his promising career, needs a job. Jenny Yee, a clever Korean college student with a penchant for reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, works a lucrative day job in the massage trade. Scott Crandall, a sleazy middle-aged actor still trolling for his first big break, is also a pimp whose stable of working ladies demand protection from a recent violent crime wave. Then there’s Onus DuPree Jr., a psycho ex-jock and ex-con, who has befriended Scott and wants to join the excitement of DuPree’s criminal enterprises. Meanwhile, Scott hires Nick as his security muscle and Jenny as a masseuse; she quickly becomes his biggest draw. To stir the potboiler, Nick and DuPree hate each other from the outset, especially after Nick and Jenny become lovers. Despite the slow buildup and scant use of humor, the dialogue is razor sharp, and the characters well developed—the good-hearted Nick is easy to root for. A robbery triggers a grisly showdown as this thriller hurtles toward its nail-biting conclusion.

October 1, 2015
An ex-boxer on the skids winds up providing security to a massage parlor in this hard-boiled slice of the Los Angeles lower depths. Nick, the former slugger at the center of this debut, is trying to survive on the fringes of LA when a fading actor hires him to provide security at the rub-and-tug joints which constitute his only income. A pair of thugs is terrorizing the city's massage parlors in a spree of robbery and rape. While on his new job, Nick meets Jenny, a college student paying for her studies by working as a masseuse, and also DuPree, a hood who bristles when he finds that Nick is unwilling to let him use the parlor girls the way he's used to. The novel is more focused on the particular private trap in which each character finds him- or herself than on the inevitable showdown between Nick and DuPree. That wouldn't be a problem if the book weren't so humorless and if it weren't drowning in hard-boiled cliches. Nick is the fighter afraid of the violence inside him after a man he fought is left dead, and Jenny, a smart, appealing character who holds herself above her trade, is merely a vessel for the moralism about sex work into which this kind of fiction often falls. The book is so determined to remain grim that it shortchanges its most likable characters. This lowdown SoCal noir winds up like its heroine, so focused on getting the job done that it doesn't provide extras.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2015
L.A., more than any city, seems to inspire Altmanesque crime novels with diverse and disconnected characters who can't help but crash into each other in the end. Schulian is a former Chicago sports journalist who relocated to L.A. to work in TV, and his first novel tells the tales of a boxer haunted by the man he killed in the ring, a young woman making a living in jack shacks (where the massages come with happy endings), a pathetic Hollywood has-been whose real income derives from the massage parlors, and a stone-cold lone-wolf criminal. With a team of rapist-robbers terrorizing the sex workers, the boxer takes a job providing security, but halfway through the novel, the reader is still wondering when the main characters will meet. As a low-key look at L.A. lowlife, this has its strong passages, particularly in the descriptions of massage-parlor dynamics. But with characters who flirt with stereotype, and pacing that drags en route to the gory climax, it's a solid but unspectacular entry in the genre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)