Jefferson Alexander "Free" Freeman, a confused homeless man, investigates a series of brutal murders, journeying from the back alleys of New Orleans to Hong Kong and facing a confrontation with the dark secrets of his own soul. A first novel.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In this boldly styled first novel, Komarnicki follows a 30-year-old homeless man on a noir odyssey of death and survival through the streets of New Orleans and Hong Kong. Adrift in the Big Easy since he was a teenager, Jefferson Alexander Freeman discovers similar tattoos on the corpses of two recently murdered Chinese men, who appear to have been out-of-towners involved with drugs. "Free," whose recent plunge through a church window left his head filled with shards of stained glass, has unwelcome dreams that move him in two alarming directions: some take him back to a shooting in the childhood he's desperate to repress; others illuminate his present life on the streets. Hiding out, drinking and scavenging have made Free nearly paranoid and susceptible to the suggestion that he might be the killer himself. Accompanying him on his self-propelled investigation is Agatha Li, a city cop with a hidden agenda and a weakness for men with shaved heads, swollen feet and open scars. Arresting images of violence and a persuasive initial narrative rush dissipate in a slow-moving sequence in Hong Kong and in the opaque resolution. Still, despite occasional lapses into coyness, Komarnicki suffuses his setting with a memorable neon-lit bleakness and, in the angst-ridden Free, creates a memorable hero.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A high concept from screenwriter Komarnicki: a homeless man turns detective to solve a series of murders. The execution, though, is middling--and muddled. Komarnicki brings a bit of authenticity to his first novel: He does volunteer work for a homeless shelter in Santa Monica. And so narrator Jefferson Alexander Freeman, a.k.a. ``Free,'' is a half- believable creation, a 30-year-old as lonely as ``a rhinoceros,'' with few memories of the days before he ended up--victim of some buried trauma--in New Orleans 13 years back. (Free's mind has been further confused by a fall through a stained-glass window, embedding glass in his skull, from which it protrudes ``like the rough outline of a horn.'') But Free is a nice homeless man, who won't beg for a living or stare at the strippers peeling in the bar he haunts; who has all his teeth; who doesn't do drugs (he throws away a chanced-upon fortune in heroin); and who cares enough about the murder of his ``buddy'' with the odd tattoo on his shoulder blade, and then that of a stripper-pal with a similar tattoo, to sleuth out the killer--all this as likely as Free's love affair with the equally lonely Chinese-American lady cop assigned to the killings. The tattoo-trail takes the duo to Hong Kong, where they tie killings in to a heroin-smuggling ring muled by America-bound refugees fleeing the imminent Red takeover--and not only does Free help solve the case but he recalls his life-shattering trauma, after which revelation the glass in his skull miraculously dissolves, leaving him a rhino no more: and on Christmas Eve, no less. Some nice insights into the homeless life--but, overall, a smart idea gets beaten senseless by overwriting. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Now we see through a glass darkly,
By T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Free (Hardcover)
The Roman Catholic convert John Henry Newman concluded sadly that the literature of England since the Reformation had been essentially Protestant. In America today even that much earlier cultural uniy is gone. There abound Jewish novels, agnostic hymns and wiccan manifestos. On that spectrum Todd Komarnicki's FREE is a Catholic novel with evocations of Newman, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and others. Consider a few of the pervasively Catholic elements of FREE. (1) The pathetic but striving anti-hero Free (christened Jefferson Alexander Freeman) had been raised Catholic in a dark past preceding his arrival in New Orleans at age 17. He is now as old as Jesus was when he began his public ministry, also after a mysterious childhood. Like Jesus, Free has no place to call his own. But Free is a shattered, pathetic, despairing failing Christian. (2) Free is rebuked by a sympathetic black priest friend for wolfing down communion wafers to still his hunger. (3) The priest and his sister deal with Free from within a Christian world view conditioned to care without questions for a pathetic brother who cannot lose residual dignity. (4) The street-smart, homeless Free embeds glass shards in his head by falling through a church's high stained glass window to the street below. (5) At novel's end Free's wounds are miraculously cleared up in the church of his black priest friend during a sermon on angels and after Free's vision of angels flying about below the ceiling. Graham Greene would have marked this novel for a second reading. From fantasy to realism: Komanarcki's treatment of Hong Kong in the years before the 1997 turnover from Britain to Red China. The reader sees Hong Kong through the terrified eyes of local Chinese reacting to the recent violent put down of democracy in Peking. Thousands decide to flee at all costs, to escape to America, to New Orleans. Their legitimate passion for a better life plays into the hands of heroin smugglers who provide the refugees with passports and a network of bribed officials who feed them into the USA and to many cities besides New Orleans. In that city a tattoo found on the murdered corpse of one of the Hong Kong Chinese, a red fleur des lis, leads Free and his newly found Chinese American detective girl friend back to the British Crown Colony in a search for the source of an unholy grail. For the fleur de lis is presented as a religious symbol, with both Marian and diabolical overtones. Again, the Catholic perspective resonates with Chesterton and Greene: in which good and evil are sometimes so close as to seem identical. A good read as puzzle, as symbolism, as theology and as a confused soul's notably blind groping for God.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Todd Komarnicki: Why isn't this man famous?,
By A Customer
This review is from: Free (Hardcover)
Every so often a new author comes along and shares a vision with his readers that had yet been unseen. Komarnicki is such a man. He has the courage and non-myopic reason that is truly refreshing. In Free, Mr. Komarnicki takes on a subject that is hoplessly difficult to draw attention to: homelessness. The books primary character, "Free", is not a pathetic, grubby character. Instead, Komarnicki carefully creates a sincere, intelligent man who is radically loyal to the end. Very intersting and very enticing. I would love to meet this fascinating author.
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