Blood Standard

March 12, 2018
Barron’s often formulaic first crime novel falls short of the high standard set by his horror fiction (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories). Isaiah Coleridge aspires to be a Sam Spade–like gumshoe, but instead he works as a strongman for the Mafia’s Alaskan branch. On a mission in Nome, where Isaiah, who was never “a hunter of dumb beasts,” is supposed to help “local mob potentate” Vitale Night massacre walruses for their ivory, he impulsively hits Vitale in the throat as the two men stand in the bow of a boat. Night’s lieutenant takes Isaiah captive, and Isaiah barely escapes execution before fleeing to New York’s Hudson Valley, where he starts a new life as a farmhand. When a teenage girl, the granddaughter of his employers, disappears, Isaiah finally gets to act out his PI fantasies and investigate. Baroque prose only belabors the conceit (“We moved against them as a bloodless dawn glow filtered through the canopy”). Since Barron has done imaginative and memorable work in the past, he could still salvage this series. Author tour. Agent: Janet Reid, New Leaf Literary & Media.

March 15, 2018
An enforcer for the Alaskan mob finds himself in trouble with all sorts of people when he gets involved in the search for a missing teenage girl in upstate New York.Isaiah Coleridge has to leave his job as mob muscle after he beats down a boss who is illegally slaughtering walruses. After a beating, and with the mob boss still determined to take him out, Isaiah is kept out of sight by being sent to work at a horse farm in New York state. While there, the granddaughter of the owners disappears, and Isaiah takes on the task of finding her. He has to deal with dirty cops, a gung-ho FBI rookie, local Native American gangs, and the hoods who are still determined to flush him out. The novel is reasonably well-executed (though the plot strands could be a mite clearer) and somewhat diverting. But it all feels depressingly familiar. This is the first novel in what is clearly a projected series, and it has some of the calculation of the first installment of a movie franchise. It's easy to see the cast of supporting characters being assembled, the establishment of a protagonist who straddles both sides of the law, and his patented laconic persona. But there's nothing witty, charismatic, or original about Isaiah. And the drab upstate New York state setting doesn't perk things up.Hard-boiled without being distinctive.

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Starred review from March 15, 2018
Barron's critically lauded The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007), in which he riffed on H. P. Lovecraft's monstrous aliens but focused their terrible wrath on criminals, spies, and ne'er-do-wells, foreshadows his latest. In Blood Standard, he has switched from horror to straightforward, hard-edged crime. Isaiah Coleridge describes himself as a gangster who kneecaps fellow gangsters for a living. He's an enforcer for the Outfit, based in Alaska. Visiting Nome, he interrupts the slaughter of a walrus herd by karate chopping the local capo. Isaiah soon finds himself secured to a chair, being brutally beaten. A phone call from Alaska's top mobster spares him castration and execution, but he is exiled to a farm in New York's Catskills to muck out stables. Soon after he arrives, the feisty and willful granddaughter of the farm's owners disappears, and Isaiah turns private eye, attracting the interest and possibly the enmity of New York's Outfit, white supremacists, mercenaries, backwoods moonshiners, the FBI, and a veritable army of pan-tribal gangbangers. Massive, scarred Isaiah is a thug's thug, but he's also a well-read student of mythology. He's indifferent to stab wounds and generates righteous mayhem in his quest. Fans of violent crime fiction will love this one and will be eager to hear more from Isaiah.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2017

Isaiah Coleridge's career as a mob enforcer in Alaska ended when he scotched the moneymaking scheme of a made man. He's leading a quiet life in upstate New York, but the disappearance of a teenage girl turns him into a private investigator. A winner of Bram Stoker and multiple Shirley Jackson awards, Barron now goes for straightforward crime fiction.

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