Identity Man Book

Explosive thriller, combines brutal violence, scorching social commentary, and a villain whose downfall is almost as inevitable and terrifying as a Greek tragedy!

One thing to bear in mind about Andrew Klavan is that he's really two people at once. There's the adrenalin junkie who loves violence and writes the meanest, tightest thrillers this side of James "LA Confidential" Ellroy, and the best gunfights this side of Stephen "Dirty White Boys" Hunter.

Then there's the really annoying Andrew Klavan. The conservative fear monger who hates Muslims, liberals, women, ethnics, and just about everyone else. The guy who's angry all the time like Ann Coulter, but not nearly as pretty and with no sense of humor. When this guy takes over a Klavan novel, watch out.

Case in point: when Shannon, the hero of this novel, is on the run, and fighting street style, smashing in knee caps, kicking in doors, running for his life, this is the best thriller ever. But once he disappears into the "White Room" for his strange new identity, watch out.

This is where Klavan starts lecturing the reader on how America just isn't what it used to be. But what you get is A CLOCKWORK ORANGE in reverse, because you have a kindly, well-meaning career criminal who's forced to viddy films, my brothers. And as he viddies, O my brothers, he starts thinking that America "used" to be a great country. Because the films that he viddies are all real starry black and white films, like CASABLANCA, and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. And this Klavan veck really wants you to believe that America was once a land where women were all chaste and lovely, like Ingrid Bergman and Katherine Hepburn and Donna Reed, and men were all gentlemen who knew the meaning of honor, like Humphrey Bogart (!) and Cary Grant.

What makes this so uproariously funny and so deeply offensive at the same time, is that Klavan is so deeply dishonest, not only about American History, but about Hollywood history. Why doesn't Shannon get to screen some REAL classics in the white room? I mean like, say, THE MALTESE FALCON, THE PUBLIC ENEMY, or even THE GRAPES OF WRATH?

I'll tell you why. One shot of Cagney shoving the grapefruit into a helpless moll's face would forever destroy Klavan's tired, dishonest Promise-Keeper manifesto about how women used to be respected back before they got the vote and began talking back. And one scene of Grandpa Joad being shoved off his land by an army of tractors would severely compromise Klavan's crude, self-serving vision the joys of free-market capitalism and the terrors of the welfare state.

One of the ironies of this book is that Klavan's hero Shannon daydreams of living like George Bailey in a simpler time and place, yet Klavan's understanding of American society (freeloaders are ruining everything, why can't we kill them all) is much closer to Old Man Potter's!

All the same, when Shannon is on the run, and when Brick Ramsey is orchestrating savage beat-downs with his minions this really is a savage, pulse-pounding thriller.

Just like IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.