Shank (Review Copy)

Imprisoned for killing his HIV-infected wife in what he claims was an act of mercy, Dan Cody escapes with a prison nurse as a hostage and recounts his life story on a radio call-in show.

Dan Cody, this strange and gripping novel's storyteller, is a man who needs to be in love?passionately, recklessly, torturously in love?but it's clear from the outset that truth is not one of his love objects. A former high-school teacher, Cody was serving a life sentence at Denning State Prison for murdering his wife. He claimed that she asked him to kill her because she was HIV-positive, and he loved her too much to watch her die of AIDS. At his trial, however, it couldn't be proved that she was even sick. Now, Cody has escaped with the help of the new object of his raptures, a prison nurse named Carol, whom the reader is meant to see as a thoroughly ordinary, even slatternly woman. Cody confesses the details of his jailbreak and expresses his frantic adoration of Carol in letters to the host of a talk show, who reads them aloud nightly to an enthralled TV audience. It becomes clear from the letters that Carol broke Cody out of prison for money, not for love, and that she was a mere helper, not the escape's real engineer. From this revelation onward, a creepily fascinating, eloquent portrait of a man nursing his delusions among some very rough trade spirals away into mayhem. Psychiatrist and novelist Anscombe (The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula) writes compellingly enough to make readers care about the ordeal of his intensely strange protagonist, though some will balk at certain details?a nearly unendurable torture scene, and acts of self-sacrifice that defy belief. What begins as a memoir of powerful love ends up as a meditation on masochism?and seems to suggest that they are much the same. $250,000 ad/promo; film rights optioned by Kevin Costner's TIG Productions/Warner Brothers; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Japan, France, Brazil, Holland and Sweden; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A mesmerizing, blackly comic confessional from a man whose troubles are just beginning when he kills his wife. Even though he's just a schoolteacher, things happen to Dan Cody. He gets life in Denning State for shooting his wife Janie; he gets isolated in Max One for kicking another inmate in the face; he engineers an audacious escape plot, murders a guard, and disappears with the nurse he's taken hostage. But as he keeps insisting to Sandy, the TV newscaster he's writing letters to, none of this is his fault: Everybody's been telling him what to do. He killed Janie only because she was HIV-positive and begged him to. The inmate he attacked was trying to get him involved in running drugs; later on, long after he'd become an unwilling mule, he had to kill another inmate to survive, and found himself controlling the prison drug trade almost by accident. ``All I want is for someone to understand what I've gone through in order to keep my spirit alive,'' he confides to Sandy, hoping she'll read his latest installment on tomorrow's broadcast. He tells her how he was drawn into the escape by Carol Ambrosino, the nurse who was just using him. All right, he was using her, but ``if I wanted to stay human, I had to escape,'' and he never thought anybody would get hurt. It's not till Dan's well away from Denning with Carol, his willing hostage, that Anscombe (The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula, 1994) begins to hint that there may be something to this plausible scoundrel's self- excuses: Just because you're paranoid, after all, doesn't mean they're not really out to get you. Showing a deeply disturbing insight into all those parts of yourself you'd rather not think about, Anscombe's produced an alarmingly off-kilter odyssey that starts as chastely as The Collector before ending up like one of Jim Thompson's wilder nightmares. ($250,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Psychiatrist Anscombe has worked at a maximum-security prison, giving him ample ammunition for this unnerving thriller. Former history teacher Dan Cody has been sentenced to life for killing his HIV-positive wife, a crime he swears he committed out of love. In prison, the well-spoken, intelligent Cody can't resist the lure of smuggling drugs for Nando and Diego, the two biggest drug peddlers in the joint. Complications arise when Cody falls in love with Carol, a nurse on the medical ward. Patiently, he woos and wins her, then acts surprised when she plans an ingenious escape so the two of them can be together. But Nando and Diego have stashed a fortune in drug money in the Caribbean, and Carol figures Cody can lead her to the cash. Carol has another nasty secret: she is having an affair with a prison guard who hopes to wind up with both Carol and the money. Everyone has an angle, and double-crosses, hidden motives, simmering violence, and dark menace abound. Add Cody's obsessive love and Anscombe's disturbing psychological twists and fiendishly clever plot, and the result is a potent thriller with great commercial potential. It won't hurt that film rights have been optioned by Kevin Costner's production company. Emily Melton