The Intruder [Hardcover]

Peter Blauner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 1996

Successful lawyer Jacob Schiff is driven to the edge by a homeless man--a patient of his social worker wife, Dana--who takes to stalking Jacob's wife and son. By the author of Slow Motion Riot. 200,000 first printing. Major ad/promo.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Peter Blauner's dark thriller The Intruder centers on John Gates, a homeless man in Manhattan who has come to believe that a lawyer named Jake Schiff has stolen his family and ruined his life. When Schiff takes up extreme measures to put an end to Gates' harassment, the world is turned upside down for both men. Blauner's characterizations are taut and he excels at creating short, edgy scenes that fray at the nerves as this morality play careens toward its inevitable conclusion.

From Publishers Weekly

The Edgar-winning author of Slow Motion Riot (and of Casino Moon) makes an intense journey into Death Wish/Straw Dogs territory, producing an edged weapon of a novel that stabs at the fears of the urban middle class. Jacob Schiff is a successful Manhattan attorney. His wife, Dana, a psychiatric social worker, offers help and hope to a mentally disturbed homeless man named John Gates. When his feelings for Dana turn obsessional, Gates begins to stalk the family, generating violent confrontations and threats. The police offer no real solutions and so Schiff makes the mistake of his life: he recruits a day-laborer/street enforcer, Philip Cardi, to warn the homeless man off. But Cardi, in pursuit of Gates, brutalizes and kills another homeless man. In response, Gates, who witnesses the crime, runs away, leaving Schiff to face a murder charge on his own. The scenes of violence are horrifyingly real, rendered in stark imagery that marks Blauner as a genuine stylist. Adept characterization makes the violence even more effective, as Blauner constructs Schiff as a decent, intelligent, caring man who learns that his friends aren't friends, his associates don't care and that he and his family must slay dragons alone. The final scene, in which the Schiffs face off against an infuriated killer, is a tour de force of savagery. There is a lot of button-pushing going on here: a crazed homeless man and a bully from Bensonhurst make easy targets; the Schiffs make obvious victims/heroes. Even so, Blauner is a skillful manipulator, offering a disturbing thriller that won't be easily forgotten. 200,000 first printing; film rights sold to Mandalay Entertainment; foreign rights sales sold in U.K., Italy, France, Japan, Germany, Denmark and Sweden.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (June 5, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684810948
• ISBN-13: 978-0684810942
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,851,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

When I was a kid, I quickly realized I didn't have much talent for throwing the baseball or playing a musical instrument or anything like that. What I had was a desire to write - which, of course, is not the same as having talent. That didn't stop me from focusing and honing in, practicing my writing the way other kids practiced free throws or 100-yard sprints.

Pretty early on, it occurred to me that I didn't want to run in the same race as everybody else anyway. A writer should have has her own slant on things. So I decided to go my own way. Even though I write what are classified as "crime novels," I don't have granite-jawed heroes or spunky heroines who always triumph over the bad guys. There are enough of those in the bookstores. I write about people with considerable flaws and consuming struggles, trying to make sense of their lives. I don't expect you to cuddle up to them or want to invite them to your Christmas dinner. But I think they have a lot of heart. Not in the sentimental sense. But in the raw, pulsing, heaving, still-beating-in-spite-of-everything sense.

I certainly don't mean to sound high-minded. After this many years in the game, I don't think a novel (particularly a "crime novel") can - or even should try to - cause great social change and upheaval. Most people just want a good story that can help pass the time on a plane. And that's my goal as well. But every once in a while, it can maybe also give you a slightly different way of looking at the world.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lots of plot twists, August 21, 2004

By 

DWD "DWD's Reviews" (Indianapolis, IN) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Intruder (Paperback)

The title to this book is interesting and serves as a decent introduction to the story. Ostensibly, the Intruder in the story is the homeless man who fixates on Jake Schiff and determines, through his crack-induced haze, that Jake Schiff has somehow stolen his family and his home. But, as you read you notice that there are actually lots of intruders. Jake Schiff is a Jewish lawyer from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood who doesn't quite fit in with his WASP law firm and their snooty ways. His wife is a social worker who is an intruder in her work world because she cares more about the clients than the bureaucracy. There's a mobster named Phillip who is an intruder in his world because he's hiding his homosexual feelings in the very, very macho world of the mafia. He's also an intruder in Jake's world as he forces Jake to deal violently with the homeless madman who has laid siege to his life.

But, then again, maybe I'm reading symbolism in to places where it doesn't belong. What the heck, it's fun. This book is a good read and has enough plot twists to satisfy all but the most jaded of readers.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY MAKES THIS THRILLER MORE THRILLING, March 24, 2001

By 

Jim Gladstone (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Intruder (Paperback)

The best things about this book are how, despite its simplicity of circumstance, its main characters are richly three-dimensional and movingly shaded: John G., the raving homeless man who sets the plot in motion through his therapeutic obsession with Jakes' wife Dana is an extremely empathetic recovering heroin addict whose own family has been torn apart by violence - there has not been an urban homeless character more engaging since the titular fellow of 1993's Free by Todd Komarnicki (Doubleday); Phil is a Brooklyn tough who poorly harbors a guilt-inducing secret; and the book's greatest character, New York City itself, is drawn with a deft versimilitude, full of subtly etched class, race and sex distinctions.

The latter is no surprise coming from Blauner, whose finely textured and harrowing 1992 debut, Slow Motion Riot won that year's Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Novel. Blauner's books are as much about sociological observation as about thrills-and-chills. His keen journalist's eye and psychological insight make for terrifically pungent prose. Tricks of social perception amongst the characters make there be not one titular intruder in this book, but at least three as Jake, Phillip and John join in a dance that finds them accidentally and purposely stepping on each others' turf and toes.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars STREET JUSTICE, March 2, 2004

By 

Michael Butts (Berkeley Springs, WV USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Intruder (Paperback)

In this rather downer of a novel, Peter Blauner etches realistic and scathing portraits of a diverse cast: Jake Schiff, a power house lawyer who finds his life turned upside down by the invasion of a "street Person" with severe emotional problems; his wife, Dana, a psychiatric social worker whose involvement with this same person catapults her family into a vortex of danger; John Gates, the street person whose tragic past and dependence on drugs, spirals him into a maze of terror; Philip, a sly mafia man who insinuates himself into Jake's life and through a murder sets a path of irretrievable terror.
Blauner has a deft touch in creating seemingly hopeless situations, and though he redeems himself with characters finally doing something right, it ends on a rather dim vision of the future of our characters.
Well done but disheartening.