Tag Archives: Nick Petrie

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tear It Down,’ by Nick Petrie

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As far as pure entertainment goes, you can hardly do better than Nick Petrie’s bombastic Peter Ash thriller series. These books are extreme in every way. Nevertheless, speaking for myself, I’m growing a teeny bit uncomfortable with them.

Peter Ash is, if you remember, a Marine combat veteran who came home with a peculiar form of PTSD. He is claustrophobic, and mostly stays out of doors. Over the course of his adventures he’s acquired a fortune in “found” money, a faithful friend who is a former Milwaukee gangster, and a feisty journalist girlfriend. Tear It Down finds him trying to settle down with the girlfriend, June. He’s exerting himself to make it work, but June can tell it takes an effort. So when her friend Wanda calls from Memphis, saying people are harassing her, she tells Peter to scoot – go help Wanda. Work it out of his system.

Wanda is a photographer who suffers from PTSD of her own. She’s been photographing war zones, and is now taking pictures of urban gangs. She doesn’t know why somebody drove a pickup truck through the front wall of her house, though. It seems both extreme, and an odd way to make a statement, when they could just shoot her.

Peter has barely arrived when he’s confronted by a kid with a gun, who wants to hijack his camper truck. Peter could take the gun away, but he instinctively likes the boy, and gives the truck up rather than hurt him. Later he learns that the boy is a gifted musician in big trouble – Peter would like to help him, if he could only find him. And he’d also like his truck back.

Solving these problems will involve bringing in his dangerous friend Lewis from Milwaukee, and chasing down a couple of desperate rednecks with their sights on a historical treasure. These guys are crazy, and not above turning a machine gun on innocent bystanders.

It speaks well of author Petrie that he wants to do good as well as entertain with Tear It Down. He tries to confront issues of race and social oppression in a positive (and hopeful) way. And that was part of my problem. I found his solutions a little glib, and not much more plausible than the book’s over-the-top plot.

Also, I’m getting a little tired of Peter’s girlfriend, June. She seems to be a good person, and is good for Peter. But we are informed that a foul mouth is one of her “virtues.” I’ve gotten accustomed to profanity in books, but treating it as a positive good is kind of extreme for this small-town boy.

I don’t know. I may go back to the Peter Ash books after a while. They’re engaging and entertaining. But I’m going to cool it on them for now.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Light It Up,’ by Nick Petrie

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The Marine, whose name was Peter, looked like he was made mostly of ax handles and shovelheads, bound together with thick rigger’s rope at the joints.

The enjoyable saga of Peter Ash, Nick Petrie’s itinerant, fresh-air hero, continues with Light It Up, a tale of legalized pot gone very wrong in Denver and its environs.

Peter, a combat-hardened Marine veteran, suffers from persistent claustrophobia caused by PTSD. In the last book he fell in love with a fiery woman named June, who has given him a year to readjust to indoor living. Then a friend, Henry Nygaard (Norwegian name; he’s from Minnesota) asks him to help him out with a problem in Denver. Henry’s daughter and her husband are running a business providing security for marijuana merchants – pot is legal in Colorado, but federal regulations force them to deal solely in cash, an irresistible magnet for crime. But the last cash delivery they were guarding disappeared entirely, along with Henry’s son-in-law. Peter shows up to help guard the next trip, and it goes very bad, very fast. Peter is left with a sense of obligation to find the criminals and bring them to justice, one way or another. But he has no idea the kind of power he’s up against.

The Peter Ash novels remind me a little of Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger books, except that Peter is younger and his forte is hand-to-hand combat, not sharpshooting. But there is the same kind of honorable hero, slightly-over-the-top action, and slightly improbable endurance and triumph. Lots of fun. I’m not a fan of legalized pot, but I’m happy to report that the cannabis business doesn’t come out looking very admirable here.

Questions about the church and homosexuality show up, but no conclusions are drawn. All in all, great series, great book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Drifter,’ by Nick Petrie

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Skinner was pale with rage, a peculiar glitter in his eye…. Again Peter felt that powerful urge to do him permanent damage. There was something primitive about it, like the urge to kill a snake. Snakes had a certain wrongness to them, the flickering tongue, that sinuous slither. Skinner had a different kind of wrongness. An emptiness in the eyes. An utter lack of regard for anyone other than himself. In ordinary moments he could hide it, could put on his charming act. But not now.

I’ve already reviewed one of Nick Petrie’s Peter Ash novels, but this one, The Drifter, is the first in the series. Peter Ash is a Marine, a veteran of Middle East action. He came home physically intact, but with a bad case of PTSD. It manifests itself as galloping claustrophobia. He’s spent a year mostly hiking and camping when he gets news that a good Marine buddy, Jimmy Johnson, has killed himself. Peter feels guilty – he should have gone to see him like he’d promised. So he goes to Milwaukee and finds Jimmy’s wife and two little boys struggling. He volunteers to rebuild their sagging front porch for them.

Under the porch he finds two sinister things – a large, angry dog and a suitcase filled with money and plastic explosives. What was Jimmy involved in? It turns out somebody’s been watching the house, and following Jimmy’s wife around. There’s a big plan in the works, and that suitcase is an important part of it. Very dangerous men will stop at nothing to get their hands on it.

I like this series very much, so far. Peter Ash is a great character – an Achilles with a vulnerable heel, formidable but relatable in his one vulnerability. The supporting characters are good too, and the plot is well crafted. The plight of the combat veteran is a continuing theme. Also, Peter strays onto the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, my (virtual) graduate alma mater. That doesn’t happen often in any form of entertainment.

Recommended. Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Burning Bright,’ by Nick Petrie

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She ticked off each item on her fingers. “You climbed a three-hundred-foot redwood. Got shot at, twice. Totaled my car. Saved my life, at least twice. Fractured your leg, cracked some ribs.” She paused for a moment, and Peter wondered how far she’d get into this. She took a breath. “You also killed at least one man, maybe more, depending on how you see things. You got stuck in the hospital, which made your post-traumatic stress flare up. And now we’re on the run in the middle of the night from whoever is hunting me.”

This one was really good.

Burning Bright, by Nick Petrie, is the second in a series about Peter Ash, a Marine war veteran who came home with PTSD that manifests itself as claustrophobia. He’s basically unable to spend any time indoors, so he’s been living under the sky for months, hiking and camping. In the redwoods of northern California he gets chased up a tree by a grizzly bear. There he unexpectedly encounters a climbing rope, which he follows up into a majestic, old-growth tree. Eventually he finds a platform in the upper branches, where he meets a beautiful young woman, pointing a bow and arrow at him.

Her name is June Cassidy. She’s a journalist, and her scientist mother died recently. Not long after, some men kidnapped her, but she managed to escape them, and now she’s here in a research post a friend built, hiding from the kidnappers, who’ve been trailing her. They are in fact at the bottom of the tree now, setting up a trap for her. Peter offers his considerable skills as a protector, and together they make their way to June’s car, in which they begin a breathless chase headed toward Seattle, and eventually into a confrontation with June’s eccentric father, a kind of a cross between Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs.

The writing in Burning Bright was extremely good. The plotting and the action never let up. What made it even better was that the characters were well-realized, and Peter’s and June’s developing relationship was a lot of fun.

Cautions for language and violence. Possible, hinted leftist opinions may become more apparent in later books (or not). But I highly recommend Burning Bright to anyone who enjoys a good thriller in the Jack Reacher vein.