Fb2 Bloodstained Kings ePub

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This novel starts off a little confusing, and I just now found out why - there is prequel of sorts called Bad City Blues in which we are introduced to some of the characters in this novel. I wish I had known that and read that first, and I intend to do so now.

In this story, we find out about an almost mythical character named Clarence Jefferson. He is a larger-than-life sheriff that has amassed a lot of information about the nefarious activities of many important individuals. Jefferson seems extremely powerful and has controlled the lives of many people and pulled many puppet strings.

At the start of this novel we hear from him, but we soon find out that our main protagonist - a character named Cicero Grimes - has killed him. Cicero is a psychiatrist who appears to be down on his luck and living in a drug and depression induced stupor. We know he has received a letter from Jefferson telling him where to locate suitcases that contain all the blackmail information he has on everyone. We also know that Cicero has killed Jefferson after having spent some time with him - and that part is confusing and as I stated earlier in this review - the prequel would've probably covered that.

We then go no to meet key characters in the story including a very wealthy woman named Lenna who is keeping someone prisoner in an area near her mansion referred to as "The Stone House." She receives a letter from Jefferson the same day Cicero does, and it gives her information that throws her for an emotional loop and seems to give her hope - that some girl is still alive.

Further characters include Cicero's wonderful and heroic father George, a young, beautiful black singer named Ella, Lenna's racist and vindictive husband Faroe, an ambitious and unethical prosecutor named Atwater, a small group of Cuban mercenaries and a large vicious but loyal dog name Gul.

What secret is Lenna hiding? The answer to that sets in motion the events in this novel as the characters race to uncover the location of the valuable suitcases and save innocents in the process.

I first discovered Tim Willocks by reading his book The Religion (Tannhauser Trilogy) which I just loved. The sequel to that is Twelve Children of Paris which I also thought was spectacular. I think he's a brilliant writer and he's a doctor in real life and it shows with his vivid depictions of what violence and injury will do to the body.

There is never a slow period in his novels and his characters - if sometimes over-the-top - are always entertaining and are always painted in shades of gray.

Recommended, but read the prequel Bad City Blues first - I didn't and I am going to make up for that now.

Having said that, I will also add I'm very well read and I found this story r to be laborious. I tried to get into it, but spent an enormous time plodding through endless sequences of description.

I debated long and hard about the number of stars, such a subjective measure. While I appreciate the brilliance of the story I am not enamored by the execution of the prose. The characters were crafted to bring out the complexity of humans with almost no redeeming values for any. Again, well-done.

Still I will stay with the three stars because I felt that the message of the story got lost in the over-abundance of verbiage.

Lots of action.
The strange part of this book is the terrible spelling and editing. It seems to have been written on the text messaging program of a cellphone.

Tim Willocks is a great author, and I would recommend him to any reader. His plots are first-rate, and his vocabulary is extensive, but not written to over ones head. I thoroughly enjoyed this read!

He nailed the New Orleans scene with a lot of very graphically violent action. Don't these characters even take time out to rest?

No one in "Bloodstained Kings" is actually in jail, but perhaps they should be-the stench of lies and mendacity suffuse the New Orleans setting. It's like "Road Warrior" as envisioned by Tennessee Williams. Tim Willocks' intense second novel leaves you drained and breathless, with desperate characters and tableaux ricocheting inside your head. Willocks' first book, "Green River Rising," was an extraordinarily wrenching thriller drenched in blood and heat and sex and philosophy, and his second is in the same vein. That tale took us inside the claustrophobic confines of an experimental prison; this one seems set inside the feverish, violent minds of the people who populate it.
The basic plot of "Bloodstained Kings" is pretty straightforward: Two ruined lives are brought together by a voice from, apparently, beyond the grave, when instructions left by a dying man jolt the novel's key characters out of stagnant existences and set in motion a series of implosions and explosions. We meet Lenna Parrilaud, a ruthless and rich businesswoman motivated only by hatred and malaise. Thirteen years ago, Parrilaud conspired to fake the death of her husband, who had performed several heinous acts against her, and has kept him drugged and helpless, in a secret barracks, ever since. Her world has been "a dark one, filled with malice and pain."
And, as in "Green River Rising," Willocks gives us a flawed and reluctant hero, a psychiatrist with the unlikely name of Cicero Grimes. Grimes has spent the last six months "clinging to the driftwood of his own self-disgust on a far-flung beach of despair," filled with rage but hampered by "psychotic melancholia." The reason for his withdrawal: a life-or-death encounter with a corrupt, larger-than-life policeman named Clarence Jefferson, the same man who helped Parrilaud imprison her husband, "the bad man's Calvin, a philosopher-king of vileness." In an incident that Willocks explains inadequately, Grimes managed to kill Jefferson, or so he thought, and is stunned to receive! a to-be-opened-in-the-event-of-my-death letter from the dying cop. The letter asks Grimes to carry out a dangerous mission-namely, to disseminate a cache of blackmail evidence accumulated over a lifetime of power playing. Jefferson was "a man born for games, a Russian roulette addict, who forced others to play along with him and usually left their corpses in his wake. Now, from beyond the grave, his swollen corpse had spun the cylinder and placed the gun to Grimes's skull."
There's an appealingly self-assured teenage girl, and Grimes' father (a WWII vet hankering for one last mission), and a lot of bad guys in suits and fatigues-and don't forget Parrilaud's seething husband moldering away in his hidden cell. There's blood, blood everywhere. Grimes "had not imagined that so much would have to be spilled or that he would be steeped in it so deep." We hadn't imagined it, either. A lot of souls are bared, teeth gritted, fists clenched. Willocks' characters, faced with unendurable anguish, endure, and return the suffering, with interest. They hardly look before leaping into their own personal abysses. Their struggles, internal and external, command attention.
The narrative roars along like a supersonic jet, gathering speed all the way to the cataclysmic finale. Despite Willocks' depths-of-the-soul plumbing and his complex, conflicted characters, action takes precedence: When called upon to pick up a semiautomatic and gun down some bad guys, every character, whether doctor or lawyer or singer or executive or retired union man, turns into an action figure. (When the teenager holds a pistol, she feels "the siren song of the weapon's power.") Not so with Jefferson, a towering figure who, like a similar character in "Green River Rising," inspires flowerings of stiffly antiquated language. "He runs no more," Willocks writes, describing Jefferson getting into a car. "The vehicle shelters his bulk within and roars; and carries the fatman, and his bundle, hence. Whither he knows not, nor yet does he care." Later he! muses: "If desire was an amoral savagery that he'd embraced without apology or regret, then love was a degradation and a crime, a plunge into gutters randomly chosen, a futile unmaking, an imbecile's gargling laughter at the joke he did not understand." If ambitious writing like this catches you in the right mood, you may be stirred and moved; otherwise you may cringe. All the lyricism and philosophical musing ("Death is the youth of the world"-OK, whatever) lead you to believe that "Bloodstained Kings"-published early, like "Green River Rising" was, in England-is grander than it is. It's really just a particularly violent noir thriller. But it's a thriller that keeps you riveted for its duration.