Konrath's Navel: warm, fuzzy

1½ oz. Peach Schnapps
3 oz. Orange Juice
Pour schnapps in a rocks or old fashioned glass filled with ice. Add orange juice.

J.A. Konrath's Fuzzy Navel, due July in stores, is his fifth novel featuring Chicago PD Lt. Jacqueline Daniels, Jack to her friends and would-be assassins. I'll confess to not reading Konrath before now, and thrillers like Navel aren't generally on my reading list, but this was a great read.

The novel opens with a case of mistaken identity of the worst kind. It unfolds from there like a good mixtape: a couple of heavy-duty opening chapters before the energy is reined. An investigation of three coordinated sniper attacks leads to a massacre, and Jack's day goes from bad to worse when she receives a phone call from her distressed mother, and worse still as revelations are made about Jack's family. Konrath admirably paces the story, which ends twenty-four hours after it began. Navel makes an even, relentless march through complication and climax to disentanglement, sprinkled with humorous one-liners.

The terminology and procedure in the book sound authentic without being intrusive. The characters each have chapters from their points-of-view, which Konrath uses to quickly characterize them without breaking into the action. It's a hard trick to pull off in normal circumstances, and impressive in a story as compressed as this one. The four antagonists play off of each other well; their characters range from tragic to psychotic.

Fuzzy Navel is a fast, high-tension book. It constantly feels like it's two pages from the end because everybody's about to die all the time. That should wear you out, but it doesn't. A few scenes smell of deus ex machina, but they're kept to a minimum. The worst use of the machine isn't even noticed until the payoff; that's about as good as it gets in this type of novel. Konrath keeps you awake and moving through the story. It ends with a cliffhanger picked up by next year's Cherry Bomb.

Order Fuzzy Navel at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Visit J.A. Konrath's homepage (where you can read the first Jack Daniels novel Whiskey Sour free), or his blog A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. You could even be his friend.