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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For the confused:, January 30, 2001
This review is from: Bloodstained Kings (Hardcover)
Just a quick point of information: Bloodstained Kings is Tim Willocks' third novel, with Green River Rising his second. The first is Bad City Blues and deals with the main characters in Bloodstained Kings i.e. Dr Grimes and Clarence Jefferson, and describes situations alluded to in Bloodstained Kings. You can get it at amazon.co.uk and personally, I would advise reading it before this, to save confusion. It is also a superb read, dealing with the same emotions and decisions that "strong men" have to struggle against as this book, and as a primer to Bloodstained Kings is excellent. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to read Bloodstained Kings without having read Bad City Blues, and still thoroughly enjoy it. Go ahead, buy this book!!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Southern Gothic., August 22, 2001
This review is from: Bloodstained Kings (Hardcover)
Bigger than life and meaner than a pitbull, New Orleans Police Lt. Clarence Jefferson has spent his career collecting dirt on the rich and powerful. Always wary, Jefferson has accumulated the incriminating evidence in two huge suitcases as insurance. One day, Jefferson disappears and, after several months, is presumed dead. He exerts his influence from beyond the grave, however, writing to his lover, the sultry heiress Lena Parillaud, and to the last man who saw him alive, Dr. Cicero Grimes. The letters provide clues to the whereabouts of the suitcases, triggering a desperate search which eventually involves the feisty WWII veteran George Grimes (Cicero's father), seedy attorney Rufus Atwater, Lena's estranged husband Filmore Faroe (recently escaped after 13 years from a prison his loving wife had made for him), and Ella MacDaniels, a young woman who unknowingly stands at the center of the mystery. Before book's end, alliances are made and broken, bullets fly, and several players lose their lives. Willocks delivers a riveting novel, a southern gothic replete with buckets of blood and philosophical musings. Willocks knows his terrain as well as James Ellroy knows L.A., and is equally unafraid to expose its dark underbelly. Frightening and hypnotic, grotesque and suspenseful, Bloodstained Kings is one of those books that grabs you and doesn't let go--Willocks provides memorable, three dimensionsal characters, sharp dialogue and rich atmosphere, weaving his protagonists' disparate lives togther with enviable skill. An unusual, unforgettable novel, a worthy successor to his previous effort, the gritty Green River Rising.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Riveting, if a bit over-the-top, May 27, 1998
This review is from: Bloodstained Kings (Hardcover)
No one in "Bloodstained Kings" is actually in jail, but perhaps they should be-the stench of lies and mendacity suffuse the New Orleans setting. It's like "Road Warrior" as envisioned by Tennessee Williams. Tim Willocks' intense second novel leaves you drained and breathless, with desperate characters and tableaux ricocheting inside your head. Willocks' first book, "Green River Rising," was an extraordinarily wrenching thriller drenched in blood and heat and sex and philosophy, and his second is in the same vein. That tale took us inside the claustrophobic confines of an experimental prison; this one seems set inside the feverish, violent minds of the people who populate it. The basic plot of "Bloodstained Kings" is pretty straightforward: Two ruined lives are brought together by a voice from, apparently, beyond the grave, when instructions left by a dying man jolt the novel's key characters out of stagnant existences and set in motion a series of implosions and explosions. We meet Lenna Parrilaud, a ruthless and rich businesswoman motivated only by hatred and malaise. Thirteen years ago, Parrilaud conspired to fake the death of her husband, who had performed several heinous acts against her, and has kept him drugged and helpless, in a secret barracks, ever since. Her world has been "a dark one, filled with malice and pain." And, as in "Green River Rising," Willocks gives us a flawed and reluctant hero, a psychiatrist with the unlikely name of Cicero Grimes. Grimes has spent the last six months "clinging to the driftwood of his own self-disgust on a far-flung beach of despair," filled with rage but hampered by "psychotic melancholia." The reason for his withdrawal: a life-or-death encounter with a corrupt, larger-than-life policeman named Clarence Jefferson, the same man who helped Parrilaud imprison her husband, "the bad man's Calvin, a philosopher-king of vileness." In an incident that Willocks explains inadequately, Grimes managed to kill Jefferson, or so he thought, and is stunned to receive! a to-be-opened-in-the-event-of-my-death letter from the dying cop. The letter asks Grimes to carry out a dangerous mission-namely, to disseminate a cache of blackmail evidence accumulated over a lifetime of power playing. Jefferson was "a man born for games, a Russian roulette addict, who forced others to play along with him and usually left their corpses in his wake. Now, from beyond the grave, his swollen corpse had spun the cylinder and placed the gun to Grimes's skull." There's an appealingly self-assured teenage girl, and Grimes' father (a WWII vet hankering for one last mission), and a lot of bad guys in suits and fatigues-and don't forget Parrilaud's seething husband moldering away in his hidden cell. There's blood, blood everywhere. Grimes "had not imagined that so much would have to be spilled or that he would be steeped in it so deep." We hadn't imagined it, either. A lot of souls are bared, teeth gritted, fists clenched. Willocks' characters, faced with unendurable anguish, endure, and return the suffering, with interest. They hardly look before leaping into their own personal abysses. Their struggles, internal and external, command attention. The narrative roars along like a supersonic jet, gathering speed all the way to the cataclysmic finale. Despite Willocks' depths-of-the-soul plumbing and his complex, conflicted characters, action takes precedence: When called upon to pick up a semiautomatic and gun down some bad guys, every character, whether doctor or lawyer or singer or executive or retired union man, turns into an action figure. (When the teenager holds a pistol, she feels "the siren song of the weapon's power.") Not so with Jefferson, a towering figure who, like a similar character in "Green River Rising," inspires flowerings of stiffly antiquated language. "He runs no more," Willocks writes, describing Jefferson getting into a car. "The vehicle shelters his bulk within and roars; and carries the fatman, and his bundle, hence. Whither he knows not, nor yet does he care." Later he! muses: "If desire was an amoral savagery that he'd embraced without apology or regret, then love was a degradation and a crime, a plunge into gutters randomly chosen, a futile unmaking, an imbecile's gargling laughter at the joke he did not understand." If ambitious writing like this catches you in the right mood, you may be stirred and moved; otherwise you may cringe. All the lyricism and philosophical musing ("Death is the youth of the world"-OK, whatever) lead you to believe that "Bloodstained Kings"-published early, like "Green River Rising" was, in England-is grander than it is. It's really just a particularly violent noir thriller. But it's a thriller that keeps you riveted for its duration.
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