Cut to the Bone: A Novel Review
Let me start off by saying that I have a real weakness for revenge books. There is just something truly decadent and delicious about taking a well-orchestrated (and violently nasty!) vengeance against those responsible for the murder of...the only person you've ever loved! Even more impressive is solid writing and interesting dialogue (how often can you say that?) which are accented by a tight plot that actually avoids the usual genre-driven pitfalls. Oh, and the hero is _totally_ hot (or at the very least, smart and charismatic).
Santos De La O (yep, it's a fake name) is a half Italian, half Mexican gunrunner/enforcer for a drug cartel in Mexico. He has family connections in the Italian mob, but leaves to start his own business because he's gay and his uncle, Vito the fixer, "can't employ no finocchio in this business, if you'll pardon the expression."
We get to watch Santos be really clever, make lots of money selling cool high-tech guns and missiles, and discover his softer side by of course falling in love with Tony. (All this happens in only about 70 sparse but perfect pages. The novel is only 200 pages long.) I can't express what a pleasure it was to read a book that has NO wasted filler, yet manages to convey a clear and emotional impact. When Santos is standing over Tony's body at the morgue "he kissed his fingertips and pressed them gently against the empty face" and says "Te amo...te amo tanto, tanto. I love you. I love so very much." Yes, my eyes actually teared up.
Without giving the rest of the book away, let me just mention some of the things the book doesn't do.
(1) Santos doesn't magically know who is responsible. We have an actual witness. And a license plate number. Wow.
(2) The drug cartel has nothing to do with Tony's murder. Yes, we were spared the tired and annoying drug cartel conspiracy plot.
(3) Not all of the cops are stupid and corrupt.
(4) Not one of the cops is a genius. ;-)
(5) Santos only does "normal" stupid things and he's only mostly lucky. We are not subjected to plot holes a 12 year old can figure out.
(6) There is no impossible action. No one jumps through a second-storey window and survives.
(7) The violence is not our usual boring blah, blah, blah violence. Really. Santos's revenge against one of the murderers is, um, original.
Hopefully I've convinced you to try this book. Oh, and if you're worried about the gay sex angle, well I'm sorry to have to say, it's of the boring ...and the next morning they woke up together...variety. Alas there is no explicit sex.
Cut to the Bone: A Novel Overview
"Stupidity. The unforgivable sin, stupidity. The only sin, to tell the truth. Never to be pardoned, not in this world nor in the world to come. Greed, treachery, blowing your cool at the check-points, not having your papers in order, playing both ends against the middle, cutting yourself a piece, yes, there were a hundred ways of being stupid for every one way of being smart. But losing a shipment? Now that was the ultimate stupidity. Losing a shipment demanded exemplary punishment, a very public auto da fe, so the less afflicted might be warned off by the ostent-tious sufferings of the hopelessly lost. Santos, one of the avenging angels of this moral order, knew that when Gregorio Olivares turned a deathly shade of purple and ranted about stupidity, retribution had taken wing."—From Chapter One
It was his last job. Santos de la O would make a mint smuggling the most sophisticated weaponry across the Texas-Mexico border for a Mexican drug lord, then retire, take his lover Tony and find the good life for both of them far from the danger and violence of El Paso–Ciudad Juarez. But a celebratory night ends in gunfire, Tony dies in Santos’s arms, and things go downhill from there. Instead of arming warring factions in the drug war, the weapons are used to assassinate a U.S. official, and then Santos is on the run from the DEA and the Mexican mob. But the only thing on his mind is revenge against Tony’s killers. With multiple parties scrambling to cover their tracks, the body count continues to rise, as Santos and Fernando, a young hustler who witnessed Tony’s murder, ruthlessly conduct a manhunt across Texas while pursued by relentless homicide detective Jenna Lessing. Santos de la O is perhaps the most morally ambivalent character to ever appear in gay literature, and Robert Conner’s unflinching portrayal of a merciless man seeking redemption behind the barrel of a gun offers a blistering update on the traditional western, where bad men inadvertently become heroes and the law is often irrelevant.
Robert Conner lives in San Francisco. He has experience with and knowledge of sophisticated weaponry. Cut to the Bone is his first novel.
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