fajrdrako | shooting at midnight...

I'd had a week or so of not settling down with any novel. I'd pick one up that looked interesting, but lapse and lose interest after two or three pages.

Then I picked up Greg Rucka's Shooting at Midnight and it had me hooked from the first paragraph.

I should point out that I'd read Greg Rucka's writing before, and loved it. I'd never read any of his novels, though. Graphic novels, yes. His excellent Whiteout with Steve Lieber as artist, his Batman story arcs (like No Man's Land), Gotham Central - but when I look at his bibliography, I see I've missed a lot of his comic book work. Finding it all will be another delightful quest.

Shooting at Midnight is technically the fourth book in Rucka's series about Security Specialist Atticus Kodiak, New York bodyguard and bouncer. But it isn't so much Atticus' story as the story of Bridgett Logan.

It starts out with the narrator's childhood memories of learning to be a cop from her father, who was in the New York Police Department, a classic Irish-American policeman. Bridgett never became a cop like she wanted to, though: addicted to heroin in her teens, she had a hard time of it, and was estranged from her father till his death - as she is now estranged from her lover, Atticus Kodiak.

An old friend asks her for a favour. Bridgett would do anything for Lisa Schoof, aged twenty-five, desperately fighting to keep clean, keep off the streets, and keep custody of her ten-year-old son, desperately trying to get an education and stay out of trouble, but her dealer - a very nasty thug named Vincent Lark - is breaking into her apartment in the middle of the night, threatening her and her son, demanding large sums of money. Lisa is convinced that the only way to get rid of him is to kill. Bridgett would be willing to die for Lisa, since the debt she owes her is huge; but not to kill for her. Bridgett tries to solve the problem by terrorizing Lark into leaving Lisa alone, but a month later, Lark is shot.... with Bridgett's father's gun, and almost certainly by Lisa. Then Bridgett decides to do whatever she must - no limits at all - to get Lisa off a murder rap.

To say more would be too much of a spoiler. I loved Bridgett, I loved her style, and she just got better and better. She's resourceful, tough, attractive, she knows comics and she wears a Hothead Paisan T-shirt. It gets better: she's brave and loyal and smart. And she's bisexual. Her bisexuality is handled convincingly and subtly, and she's not even a serial killer.

Not only that, but her relationship with Atticus is fascinating, convincing, romantic, and without a cliche in sight.

What a great book. All that, and an ending with a double surprise.

Even better, the innumerable characters, minor and major, are all vivid and memorable. No problem confusing identities or characters in this book. It isn't just that there's non-stop action with clever, vulnerable, brave-but-flawed protagonists; there are their friends and co-workers, each one vivid and real. Scott Fowler, the stylish FBI guy with earrings. Erika, the bright, temperamental teenager. Dale Matsui, the large gay Japanese-American bodyguard.

Great action, great characters.... And if I occasionally thought I sensed a whiff of the same sort of dramatic style that makes Batman and Catwoman great, well, so much the better.

So then I had to read the other Atticus Kodiak novels. Each was as good as the last. In sequence:

Keeper - Atticus Kodiak takes his girlfriend to a clinic for an abortion, running a gamut of hostile protesters. While waiting for Alison there, he befriends the doctor's daughter Katie, a sixteen-year-old with Down's syndrome. The doctor, Felice Romero, calls Atticus into her office. She's speaking at a conference called "Common Ground", where pro-choice and anti-abortion speakers will be discussing their ideas, and has received a stack of horrific death-threats. She needs a bodyguard. Knowing or guessing the impossibility of the task, Atticus takes it on.

What a terrific hero. Atticus is just about perfect.

So is his romance with Bridgett Logan, all the more because it isn't an easy one.

Finder - Atticus' past comes back to haunt him when, working as a bouncer at an S&M club, he comes face to face with Erika, a girl he used to know when she was eleven; he was her father's bodyguard and her mother's lover. She is now fifteen, tricking at a club for a place to spend the night. In his attempts to help the angry teen, Atticus gets caught between her ex-Pentagon father, the SAS, a "rogue brick" of the SAS, and Erika's beautiful, dangerous mother.

Smoker - Atticus takes on "John Doe", one of the world's top assassins, who is set on preventing a whistleblower in the cigarette industry from giving his testimony. John Doe's identity and even his existence are so elusive as to be ephemeral; the owner of the security company who hires Atticus' hates him; and the assassination-victim in suicidal. Two of the more amusing characters in this one are Chesapeake and Hunter Drake, private eyes with names, Atticus says, even stranger than his own - who reminded me of Fenris in Marvel comics: beautiful, dangerous and vaguely incestuous siblings.

It isn't surprising that Rucka would have comic book references, since he writes them, but I love every minute of it all. It's almost as good as having Stephane Plum fantasizing about Batman.