The Red Storm

October 5, 2015
Former heavyweight boxer William Fletcher, the narrator of Bywaters’s promising debut, winner of the PWA Best First Private Eye Novel competition, is scraping by as a PI in 1938 New Orleans when Bill Storm, a criminal acquaintance, asks Fletcher to find his estranged daughter, the beautiful but hate-filled Zella Storm. Fletcher winds up becoming Zella’s protector after Bill’s murder. Because Sal Mallon, a psychopathic mobster whom Bill mutilated years before, now craves revenge, Fletcher finds himself negotiating with rival gangsters, hiding Zella and her aunt in a cabin in the swamp, and collaborating—nervously, since he’s black—with the corrupt, racist New Orleans police. Staying alive is difficult; resisting various temptations to back away is even more so—but Fletcher slogs ahead through a hail of bullets. Bywaters edges near Hammett territory with this unassuming hero who stoically accepts that, even though the odds are heavily stacked against him, he still needs to go on doing the best he can.

October 1, 2015
This debut novel introduces an African-American boxer-turned-shamus struggling to ply his trade in Depression-era New Orleans. Fifteen years ago, before he left the ring because he realized the color line would keep any black boxer from rising to the top, William Fletcher hired his muscles out to New York enforcer Bill Storm. Their association ended abruptly when Fletcher, left to guard a boy his boss had kidnapped, set him free instead. Now Storm, apparently unaware of the irony, has come to the Big Easy in search of his vanished daughter, and he wants Fletcher to help. It takes little time for Fletcher to find Zella Storm, who's working as a singer in a seedy club, and even less to ascertain that she's not interested in returning to her father. But that's not really a problem, since Storm's been shot to death in Congo Square, the first of what turn out to be many victims in this loose, violent, wide-ranging tale. Storm's murder heralds Fletcher's unwilling involvement in a gang war between local racketeer Johnny Ranalli and New York numbers runner Sal Mallon, the kidnapping victim Fletcher freed so long ago. The inevitable result is lots of clipped threats, fistfights, and hired thugs no more memorable while they're still alive than after they're dead. Bywaters saves a pair of big surprises for the end, though by that time the ranks of the cast are so diminished that precious few suspects remain. The best things here are Fletcher's detailed, precise first-person descriptions of boxing and slugging and his accounts of the racism to which he's routinely subjected. But although Bywaters plows some of the same fields as Walter Mosley, the harvest isn't nearly as rich.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 1, 2015

This Minotaur Books/Professional Writers Association Best First Private Eye Novel Competition-winning story follows an ex-boxer private investigator in New Orleans. (See review on p. 68.)

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.