Free - Hardcover

Komarnicki, Todd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385468490 ISBN 13: 9780385468497

Publisher: Doubleday, 1993

Synopsis

Jefferson Alexander "Free" Freeman, a confused homeless man, investigates a series of brutal murders, journeying from the back alleys of New Orleans to Hong Kong and facing a confrontation with the dark secrets of his own soul. A first novel.

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Reviews

In this boldly styled first novel, Komarnicki follows a 30-year-old homeless man on a noir odyssey of death and survival through the streets of New Orleans and Hong Kong. Adrift in the Big Easy since he was a teenager, Jefferson Alexander Freeman discovers similar tattoos on the corpses of two recently murdered Chinese men, who appear to have been out-of-towners involved with drugs. "Free," whose recent plunge through a church window left his head filled with shards of stained glass, has unwelcome dreams that move him in two alarming directions: some take him back to a shooting in the childhood he's desperate to repress; others illuminate his present life on the streets. Hiding out, drinking and scavenging have made Free nearly paranoid and susceptible to the suggestion that he might be the killer himself. Accompanying him on his self-propelled investigation is Agatha Li, a city cop with a hidden agenda and a weakness for men with shaved heads, swollen feet and open scars. Arresting images of violence and a persuasive initial narrative rush dissipate in a slow-moving sequence in Hong Kong and in the opaque resolution. Still, despite occasional lapses into coyness, Komarnicki suffuses his setting with a memorable neon-lit bleakness and, in the angst-ridden Free, creates a memorable hero.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A high concept from screenwriter Komarnicki: a homeless man turns detective to solve a series of murders. The execution, though, is middling--and muddled. Komarnicki brings a bit of authenticity to his first novel: He does volunteer work for a homeless shelter in Santa Monica. And so narrator Jefferson Alexander Freeman, a.k.a. ``Free,'' is a half- believable creation, a 30-year-old as lonely as ``a rhinoceros,'' with few memories of the days before he ended up--victim of some buried trauma--in New Orleans 13 years back. (Free's mind has been further confused by a fall through a stained-glass window, embedding glass in his skull, from which it protrudes ``like the rough outline of a horn.'') But Free is a nice homeless man, who won't beg for a living or stare at the strippers peeling in the bar he haunts; who has all his teeth; who doesn't do drugs (he throws away a chanced-upon fortune in heroin); and who cares enough about the murder of his ``buddy'' with the odd tattoo on his shoulder blade, and then that of a stripper-pal with a similar tattoo, to sleuth out the killer--all this as likely as Free's love affair with the equally lonely Chinese-American lady cop assigned to the killings. The tattoo-trail takes the duo to Hong Kong, where they tie killings in to a heroin-smuggling ring muled by America-bound refugees fleeing the imminent Red takeover--and not only does Free help solve the case but he recalls his life-shattering trauma, after which revelation the glass in his skull miraculously dissolves, leaving him a rhino no more: and on Christmas Eve, no less. Some nice insights into the homeless life--but, overall, a smart idea gets beaten senseless by overwriting. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385468490
• ISBN 13: 9780385468497
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 273