CHASERS - Lorenzo Carcaterra

According to the bio that came with the book, CHASERS is the 5th book by Lorenzo Carcaterra and a followup to APACHES. The author lives in New York and has written scripts for films and TV shows, including Law and Order. Perhaps that's where the style and content of CHASERS comes from, because this is a very specific type of thriller book, possibly appealing to a particular type of taste.

Set in 1985 in New York, machine-guns are used to murder a target in a Manhattan restaurant, killing innocent bystanders in the process. The brutal slaying propels the surviving members of the Apaches into the investigation of a Colombian drug cartel run by an ex-priest.

The Apaches are a group of controversial ex-cops famous for their take no prisoners, tolerate no garbage style. Original members of the group are joined by some new recruits - a wounded arson investigator, an HIV-positive specialist in forensics and a retired police dog. From the blurb on the book "Now this dedicated team will become Chasers, working multiple cases that will converge into one explosive, all-out New York City street war".

To like CHASERS if might be best if you're a fan of endless dead bodies, assorted gangs facing off against each other (at some point you were left wondering if there was room for anybody else in the city); blood running in the streets; wise-cracking, deeply cynical New York Cops; dialogue that flows through the ear like a staccato dentist drill; vengeance; and rampant gratuitous, almost celebrated, violence.

And boy oh boy is there a lot of everything that's just a bit stomach churning. Spattered gore doesn't begin to explain it, mentioning that there are a lot of dead bodies in this novel doesn't do justice to the dismembering, mayhem and general discarding of human beings left right and centre throughout the book. There's nothing wrong with a high body count in a thriller after all, but somewhere buried under the assorted body parts you'd hope there would be a story being told. This searching for the story under the gore is complicated further by the nature of the dialogue, every single character using the same slick, smart, sassy, street talk (or whatever you'd call it style) that meant that most of the time it was almost impossible to tell which character said what.

I guess ultimately CHASERS could read like a film adaption waiting to happen (although what rating you'd give this level of mayhem beggars the mind), but as a book (for a fan of the occasional over the top thriller) it left a bit to be desired.