Bloody Martini

Starred review from December 19, 2022
Kotzwinkle’s exceptional sequel to 2021’s Felonious Monk takes Benedictine monk and killer Tommy Martini back to his birthplace of Coalville, to honor the final request of his best friend, Finn Sweeney. Finn’s plea—in a frantic voicemail message cut off by a gun shot—is for Martini to find and take care of his wife, Bridget Breen, an old crush of Martini’s from their high school days when Martini was captain of the football team. In Coalville, Martini fends off local goons, bought-off cops, and politicians who want him dead—in particular, Brian Fury, the sadistic district attorney who couldn’t pin Martini for murder eight years earlier. The trail Martini pursues leads to a child prostitution conspiracy that seems to involve everyone in town. Queenie O’Malley, who admired Martini in high school and drew a cartoon of the football team for the school paper, provides some romantic distraction, even though she’s engaged to be married and he’s a monk. This wry, extremely funny, character-driven novel will remind readers of classic L.A. noir, though its treatment of relations between men and women has been updated for modern sensibilities. Kotzwinkle is sure to win new fans with this one. Agent: Richard Curtis, Richard Curtis Assoc.

December 15, 2022
A monk is called from his Mexican monastery back to his hometown, where he kicks major ass. His mobbed-up relatives have sequestered Thomas Martini with the Benedictines in the Sonoran Desert ever since he punched Michael Muldoon to death in a barroom brawl. But his sheltered life ends with a phone message from his own school friend Finn Sweeney, who begs him with his dying breath to take care of Bridget, the wife who's gone missing. Despite his current residency, Tommy--who confesses, "I like trouble"--never hesitates. Back in Coalville, Bridget Breen had wrapped Tommy and everyone else around her little finger before she settled down with Finn, who purchased TV station WVIM and started raking muck. Tommy finds Coalville much as he'd left it. Queenie O'Malley and Shirley Kaminski, who'd both caught his eye back in high school, are still in residence, Queenie as the WVIM receptionist, Shirley as a meth-addicted prostitute. Mike Muldoon's brothers, Killian and Connor, are still on hand too, salivating at the chance to take down their brother's killer. The town is honeycombed with gangsters, enforcers, sex workers, and drug addicts, some of them Tommy's relatives. Tommy's sadistic schoolmate Brian Fury, now the district attorney, has moved on from torturing animals to spending his nights with the 15-year-old prostitute Ruby the Forbidden Fruit. Tommy unleashes the muscle he's been hiding under a bushel whenever necessary, and he himself is rescued by Queenie, who, much to her surprise, kills three men before they can kill him. Everything, in short, is over-the-top, which is just the way Kotzwinkle likes it. A fitting memorial to the wisdom of the hero's late grandfather: "I'm always angry. It saves time."

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February 15, 2023
Tommy Martini shows his hard-boiled PI creds right off in this riot of a novel, letting us know that he knows that "venomous reptiles give you a picture of the world as it really is." There are the required fistfights, explosions, betrayals, and used-up people with skin "the color of a poisonous white mushroom." But this is Kotzwinkle, who wrote the semi-raunchy E.T. novelization in which he had the little alien lusting after Henry's mom! Here, he rocks PI conventions. Martini is a monk, of all things, summoned back into the fray by a plea from a dying friend to take care of his widow. Martini's efforts lead him into the underbelly of a dying little town. But Kotzwinkle isn't Chandler looking sadly down from Olympus; no, he's mixing it up with the reptiles and bad blondes and having a fine time. For all the desolation, one has a sense of a writer gleefully deploying a splendid gift for creating bright images that illuminate a moment without distracting from it. After a tasering, Martini feels like "an electric eel had slithered through my nervous system."

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.