Pirata

May 14, 2018
Former California car salesman Nick Lutz, the narrator of this thoughtful thriller from Hasburgh (Aspen Pulp), is called Pirata by the locals of Sabinita, Mexico, for the patch he wears over the eye he lost in a carjacking—the first in a series of misfortunes that led to the loss of his job, a lasting break from his wife and son, and his move to Mexico. In Sabinita, Nick uses his one passion, surfing, to cover up his emotional pain. When Meagan, the girlfriend of his surfing buddy, Winsor, puts a claw hammer in Winsor’s skull to protect her son Jade from being molested by Winsor, Lutz reluctantly agrees to get rid of the body. As he becomes more involved with Meagan, Jade, and her other son, Obsidian, their menage looks to be turning into a family. But Meagan leaves with Jade’s father, and the federales and the FBI enter to further complicate his life after an unidentified body washes ashore. Hasburgh tells a moving human story, but the surfeit of surfing lingo may bewilder readers unfamiliar with the sport. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Agency.

Nick Lutz is an expat living in a sleepy Mexican surf town whose eye patch is the only apparent sign of the attack he suffered in his previous life in California. Narrator Charlie Thurston portrays Nick eloquently--surely a heavy-drinking surf bum would not be this articulate, but, happily, the listener is spared the surfer dude clich�s. Nick helps a fraught woman dispose of the body of her abusive boyfriend and precariously creates a cobbled-together family with her teenage sons. Thurston narrates most of the voices with a straight delivery, lending an accent to the Mexican police during their probing questions about the gringo body that washed up on the shore. Even listeners who don't surf can enjoy Thurston's lyrical treatment of the poetic descriptions of hanging ten. N.M.C. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

May 1, 2018
Nick Lutz is a noir hero in excelsis. He's down on his luck, hiding out in a hangdog community in Mexico. Years ago he was shot in the eye, and the bullet came out the back of his head. He's given to seizures. During a bad one, he drove into a tree and saw his son being carried away with a broken neck. Now he's complicit in a killing. An FBI agent appears. Then, suddenly, the darkness recedes, and we're transported into a surfing novel, awash in hollow overheads and pitchy barrels; just as suddenly, the surf's down, and Nick is off trying to be a father to two children of a single mother. Here's the curious thing: these interludes are so compellingly written that even the most noir-hungry readers will find themselves almost forgetting to miss the dark stuff. Surfing and crime have come together before, most notably in Kem Nunn's cult classic Tapping the Source (1984) and in Don Winslow's The Dawn Patrol (2008) and The Gentleman's Hour (2011), but Hasburgh ups the ante by adding domestic drama into the mix. A strange brew, but it works.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)