The Exiled

Christopher Narozny's first novel, Jonah Man (2012), was a well-regarded story of an early 20th-century one-handed juggler cum drug courier and his fellow shady vaudevillians. His second, The Exiled, is such a leap across genres that it appears under the pseudonym Christopher Charles. Set amid the arroyos and piñons of New Mexico, it is the contemporary story of county homicide detective Wes Raney's investigation into a brutal triple murder at an isolated ranch outside Santa Fe. Raney is a former Brooklyn undercover cop who, 18 years earlier, worked the city armpit of mobsters, murder and dope. Alternating between the story of Raney's on-the-job fall into cocaine addiction and subsequent exile from the NYPD and his current dogged sleuthing, Charles paints a graphic picture of Raney as a lonely man with a fine-tuned cop's intuition and a stubborn drug jones.

The Exiled is rich in side characters, like the New York capo's nephew--unpredictably violent, "like the chemical that makes fear was sucked from his brain"--or the waitress who "looked like she'd spent the first fifty years of her life smoking cigarettes while standing under a hot sun." But this is Raney's story. After several more killings, he tracks down the Mexican cartels and twisted locals behind the mayhem, but he never quite shakes the memories of his past. The Exiled is a fine piece of crime fiction with a keen sense of timing and character. Let's hope for another Raney novel soon--regardless of what name Narozny writes it under. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

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