Mean Business on North Ganson Street

July 7, 2014
A brutal dystopia serves as the setting for this present-day detective novel from Zahler (A Congregation of Jackals). The botched handling of an interview with a distraught man results in Arizona detective Jules Bettinger’s forced transfer to the police department in decaying Victory, Mo., a town of 26,000 with an extraordinarily high crime rate. Each of 24 officers “is responsible for a minimum of seven hundred criminals, four to five hundred of which have committed violent acts.” Bettinger soon discovers that other cops, including his new partner, Dominic Williams, don’t play by the rules. Their brutality, which reduced one criminal to a shattered cripple, initiates a war that begins with the murder of two cops and turns Victory into a cratered battleground. When Bettinger’s family comes under threat, he descends to the level of his new colleagues. The over-the-top tough guy dialogue wears thin, as does the constant graphic violence. Zahler, a screenwriter about to make his directorial debut, is adapting this book into a movie for Warner Brothers, with both Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio attached to the project. Agent: Lydia Wills, Lydia Wills LLC.

August 15, 2014
A detective's smart mouth gets him transferred from sunny Arizona to frigid Missouri, where life is worse in every way imaginable.After Jules Bettinger makes a remark that causes a suicide, he's lucky to be transferred to Victory, Missouri, a decaying Rust Belt city so awful that he rents a house more than 80 miles away for his wife and two children. His loutish new partner has recently been demoted for his part in crippling a drug dealer, and none of the other cops seem any more welcoming. His new boss, explaining that the understaffed force can only concentrate on the worst crimes, gives him a murder case to work. The death of a prostitute whose killer had sex with her dead body seems bad enough until Bettinger realizes that this is just one of a series of similar outrages. When two cops are murdered and mutilated, the whole force concentrates on finding those killers, but the carnage escalates, leaving more officers dead in horrifying circumstances. The answer seems to lie with the crippled drug dealer, who's suddenly vanished, along with his sister and girlfriend. Naturally, Bettinger is convinced that he's the one behind the crime spree. Although he's disgusted with his fellow officers' actions, he begins to understand them better when he learns the reason they crippled the dealer. Bettinger soon finds himself in the killer's sights. He barely escapes, but not all of his family is equally lucky. Paired with his partner and another of the cops who damaged the drug dealer, he heads farther north to search for the mastermind in a raging blizzard in an area so blighted it makes hell look cheerful. If you can get past the detailed descriptions of violence and mutilation, you'll find that Zahler (Corpus Chrome, Inc., 2014, etc.) tells a gripping story.

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Starred review from September 1, 2014
Detective Jules Bettinger is a decorated cop, but when he brusquely tells a middle-aged fool that he has been scammed out of $75,000 by a teenage hooker, and the shamed fool commits suicide in the police stationand the fool is the mayor's brother-in-lawBettinger's two-decade-long Arizona law-enforcement career is over. He reluctantly relocates to the small city of Victory, Missouri. On arrival, he is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of a prostitute, and he's partnered with a detective who may be deeply bent. Soon cops are being ambushed, murdered, and sexually mutilated, and Bettinger learns that it may be revenge for police stomping a local drug dealer. But he has to stay alive to find out for sure. Whether writing westerns, science fiction, or crime, Zahler (Corpus Chrome, Inc., 2013) always manages to bring something new to the genre. This time it's the most shambolically dying Rust Belt city in crime fiction. Bettinger prowls neighborhoods known as the Toilet and Shitopia. Eight in 10 male residents, 700 for every cop, have criminal records. Cars slalom around pigeon carcasses, and everyone wonders why dead cats are nailed to telephone poles. Zahler's mean streets are bizarrely mean. But Mean Business is often mordantly funny, tooand not to be missed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)