Never Count Out the Dead [Hardcover]

Boston Teran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

Boston Teran's debut, God is a Bullet, a taut, dark, and astonishing literary suspense novel, was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and won England's Crime Writers Association's John Creasey Memorial Dagger for Best First Novel.

Now, with Never Count Out the Dead, Teran exceeds the extraordinary achievement of his debut, delivering a tour de force tale of a murder gone wrong and a victim bent on revenge.

In a rundown Los Angeles bungalow, Shay Storey sits across a battered Formica table watching her mother clean the semi-automatic they will use for a killing. It is 1987 and Shay is just thirteen. Their intended victim is a local policeman named Victor Sully. Shay and her mother shoot him and bury him in a shallow grave in the desert northeast of Los Angeles, but somehow, some way, Sully claws his way to survival.

His life, though, is destroyed anyway, and he slips out of Los Angeles under cover of darkness, a broken man. It is more than ten years later that these three lost souls meet again to play out the inevitable drama set in motion by that first violent meeting in the desert, each searching for revenge, and perhaps, redemption.

Riveting, powerful, and brilliantly written, Never Count Out the Dead is an unforgettable reading experience that will linger in your brain long after the last page is turned.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A policeman and a young girl drive across the Mojave Desert toward a deathly quiet valley where the girl's mother waits. In a wealthy Los Angeles enclave, another man waits for news of the policeman's death. Cop John Victor Sully is in the wrong place at the wrong time, ready to convict the right man of the right crime--and that, for crooked developer Burgess Ridden and his heroin-addict girlfriend Dee Storey, will never do. Burgess may not have the guts or the smarts to save himself from impending disaster, but Dee will do anything, including making her 13-year-old daughter, Shay, an accessory to murder: "Like face cards their images resemble, flat and stoic on that black gaming table of a windshield. Two queens, baby. One there, and one on the come. If she lives long enough."

But the best-laid plans are those that go hideously awry. Sully survives that night in the desert, clawing up through the dirt of a shallow grave, only to become "a boundary walker trapped inside the self of past." His reputation ruined by a clever frame-up, he will spend the next 10 years in self-imposed exile until a journalist named Landshark brings him back to L.A. to clear his name. His return touches off a deadly "blood waltz across reality" in which lives count for nothing and survival is everything--and in which his only ally is the young woman who led him to his death a decade earlier.

Boston Teran stunned critics with his debut novel, God Is a Bullet. Most raved about its explosive prose and in-your-face action, though a few felt that the author's style was a bit too much of a good thing. Teran is admittedly a writer for whom excess is glorious and for whom language is a wondrous, near-tangible commodity. His second novel, however, reveals a definite maturation: if God Is a Bullet reveled perhaps a bit too much in its own linguistic conceit, Never Count Out the Dead never allows the brilliance of its language to cast all else into shadow. Taut rather than bloated, the novel is as edgy as a hollow-eyed junkie and as extravagant as a drift of desert orchids. Teran retakes the stage with the assurance of an elegantly seasoned performer.--Kelly Flynn

From Publishers Weekly

Award-winning crime novelist Teran jars the soul with this chaotic, murderous tale set in a sunbaked, nightmarish Los Angeles County. Dee Storey is a 28-year-old speed addict who will do anything to get more drugs from dating slimy Beverly Hills rich boy Burgess Ridden to carrying out a contract killing. Using her 13-year-old daughter, Shay, as bait, Dee shoots Sheriff John Victor Sully in the Mojave National Preserve, dumping him in a shallow grave. His bullet-ridden body buys the silence of coke dealer Charlie Foreman, the man who knows all the secrets behind two major school construction projects run by Ridden's father. It will be nearly 11 years before Shay, Dee, Charlie, Burgess and a comical cross-section of Southern California scumbags learn an important lesson--never count out the dead. Miraculously surviving only to be slammed with trumped-up drug charges, Sully flees to El Paso, utterly lost and broken. Enter agoraphobic William Worth, owner of the Garden of Allah hotel and a biting L.A. columnist who writes under the byline "Landshark." Smelling something foul, Landshark urges Sully to come back to Los Angeles to haul Ridden and the crew to justice. Once in the city, Sully unknowingly becomes sexually involved with the now 23-year-old streetwise vixen, Shay Storey, ordered again by her mother to execute him. Fate has other plans, however, and a showdown is set in San Frasquito Canyon. Teran's razor-sharp tale is tinged with pseudoreligious sentiment as the author unravels an expansive and layered network of crimes committed by desperate people attempting to shed their own skin and the silent "dead" who long for resurrection. (May)Forecast: Teran's first novel, God Is a Bullet, was nominated for an Edgar. This, his second, cements his status as a pulp virtuoso with a gothic sensibility. Unless fans get the word out, though, the book may fall through the cracks, since it isn't backed by any kind of marketing effort and will likely glean few reviews as a genre title.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur; 1st edition (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312271158
• ISBN-13: 978-0312271152
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,808,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Darkly Disturbing Tale of Revenge, April 5, 2002

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Never Count Out the Dead (Hardcover)

With all the subtlety of a sledge hammer, Boston Teran's second novel again stuns and shocks, while spinning a story that is nearly impossible to put down. As in his first novel (God is a Bullet), Teran sets the scene in the gritty southern California desert wasteland. The bleakness of the desert diners and roadhouses proves the perfect setting for a new cast of Teran characters: hard women, bad cops, an agoraphobic writer. Unlike "Bullet", in which sometimes Teran's overly rich language gets in the way of his story, the prose in "Dead" is lean, tight, and gripping. If you like the happy plastic people found in James Patterson and other popular "thriller" writers, either of Boston Teran's novels will likely disturb and possibly offend your senses. But if you're looking for an in-your-face, by-the-throat, modern tale of noir and raw-boned terror, THIS is your ride.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cinematic Prose, July 8, 2001

By 

Perry M. Smith "prysmith" (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Never Count Out the Dead (Hardcover)

Boston Teran's NEVER COUNT OUT THE DEAD is an amazing and enviable feat for any writer, but a wildly successful accomplishment for a novelist fixated on the seedier byways of human relationships. There is not one badly drawn character in this novel, not one implausible moment, but Teran is most successful with Dee and Shay Storey, a pair who make Clytemnestra and Elektra seem like Girl Scouts. Dee, especially, is the sort of character that any actress of a certain age would give her capped eye teeth to play. This is a fully formed living, breathing pathology, wholly unreedemed and as elemental as lava. I would love to see this book on the big screen. It would make an absolutely terrific (in every sense) movie.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wish I liked it more--Characters never really come to life., May 22, 2001

By 

Craig Larson (Maple Grove, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Never Count Out the Dead (Hardcover)

This is the sort of book that's usually right up my alley. I love the darker, grimmer side of crime writing. James Ellroy's one of my favorites. But I just couldn't get into Boston Teran's latest. His characters are tragic and haunted by life. They make grand speeches about how pointless everything is. Dee Storey, the hellish monster/mother at the center of the story, should be much more frightening/horrifying than she is. For whatever reason, the characters just lie there, flat on the page, never truly coming to life. This could have been a great, great book, but just doesn't quite make it.