Pyres [Hardcover]

Derek Nikitas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2007

In PYRES, 15 year old Lucia Moberg lifts a CD out of a store in a shopping mall—and when she and her dad get into their car, there is a tap at the window.  The next second her father's brains are on the dashboard.  So begins the story of the ruin of her mother, whose home life is shrouded in darkness, a mysterious and menacing motorcycle gang, the real-to-life female cop out to crack the case, who is facing her own family's collapse, and the struggle for Lucia to piece together some semblance of a normal teenage life.  The writing is hard and crisp, and wholly multi-dimensional, while the story moves along at a nail-biting pace with twists, turns, literary allusions, and the engaging plight of several fascinating, memorable, and fully rounded characters.   

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Short story writer Nikitas fills his engaging, atmospheric first novel, set in upstate New York, with Swedish mythology and American carnage. The life of 15-year-old Lucia Luc Moberg, who dresses goth and rebels against her mother, irrevocably changes after a trip to the mall with her S.U.N.Y. professor father, Oscar. Stealing a few CDs for her friends from a music and video store, she runs to the bookstore to find her father and begs him to leave immediately, feigning illness. Unfortunately for Luc, far worse awaits the Mobergs in the mall parking lot—an armed gunman who shoots and kills Oscar. The murder sets off a violent chain of events that tears apart the Mobergs and their community. Fans of Joyce Carol Oates, who provides a blurb, will in particular enjoy this unrelentingly dark and brutal novel with its ironic twists. (Oct.)
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From Booklist

Lucia "Luc" Moberg is "fifteen and scrawny, five feet tall in her purple Doc Martens," when she sees her college-professor father shot to death. In short order, her mother makes two unsuccessful attempts at suicide. Already troubled, Luc struggles to make sense of events and maintain her tenuous grip on emotional stability. Luc's father's murder is investigated by police detective Greta Hurd, who has no shortage of her own demons, spawned by 20 years of investigating violent crimes and her own failure as a mother. This is a polished first novel. Nikitas skillfully illuminates the many aspects of a number of significant characters and propels the plot with apparent ease. Interestingly, his female characters are substantially better drawn than the men in the story. Luc's reactions, for example, to her father's death and her mother's collapse, suggest great insight into the psyche of a 15-year-old nearly overwhelmed by grief and stress. A heartbreaking coming-of-age story and a gripping psychological thriller. Gaughan, Thomas

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 308 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (October 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312363974
• ISBN-13: 978-0312363970
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,592,669 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Derek Nikitas grew up in New Hampshire and upstate New York. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is currently pursuing his PhD in Creative Writing at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He has published stories in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Ontario Review, Chelsea, The Pedestal Magazine, and others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and will be a Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2007.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!, July 6, 2008

By 

Mark K. Mcdonough "Mark McDonough" (Reston, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pyres (Hardcover)

I read a lot of stuff that falls under the general heading of mystery/crime fiction, but don't review a lot of it on Amazon. I love to read and don't really watch TV, so crime fiction's kind of my literary junk food -- an enjoyable way of passing the time before bed, when chores are done.

Now and then, I happily discover something with real literary merit, and "Pyres" is one of those books. A number of things make "Pyres" stand out. For one, Nikitas can really write. The jacket copy says he's working on a Ph.D. in creative writing, and it shows. There's nothing "academic" about his writing, but it's quite obvious that he's been honing his craft for a long time. The plot, though complex, makes sense. The settings are carefully observed and beautifully described. What's more, this book has a quality that doesn't really have a name but which I know as an enthusiastic amateur cook. The ingredients are many and flavorful, and retain their individuality, but they are all in the right proportion. There's a bit of magical realism, but not too much. A bit of disaffected teen culture, but not too much. We get a glimpse of the messy family life of the lead detective, but it doesn't pull the story out of shape. And so on.

The end result is a book that rings true and has plausability and power.

It's a reviewing cliche to say that novels have believable characters, but hey, I'm writing this for free, so I'll just say that the book has believable characters. Particularly memorable are Lucia, the teen girl who confronts evil at its most banal, Greta Hurd, the cop who tries to rescue her, and the various troglodytes in a local biker gang which takes its name from a Stephen King novel.
One thing that added to my enjoyment of the book is that the bikers, while clearly beyond any redemption, are not just cartoon villains. I guess you could say that they are real villains -- ignorant, discarded people who hate the world that has given them so little and have paid that world back by honing skills for mayhem which give them a power that ordinary civilized folks long ago forgot about. In short, they are very scary.

An additional pleasure for me was that the book is set in and around Rochester, NY. I grew up there, but haven't spent any time there in recent decades, and it was fun to recognize local landmarks somewhat transmuted. Even in the glory years of Kodak and Xerox, Rochester had its seamy side. It was interesting to read about the city from the outside looking in, with the reasonably comfortable suburbs of my youth a footnote -- a haven for the clueless. I spent some time kicking around the scruffy semi-rural parts of upstate New York as a kid on a bike (the kind you pedal) and it's nicely portrayed, if a bit generic (fair enough, the landscape is not the star in this book).

Every year I come across only a handful of books this good. A real pleasure.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best First Novel, December 29, 2007

By 

William A. Beckerley "Still Bill" (San Carlos, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pyres (Hardcover)

I give Nikitas' "Pyres" 5 stars for a best first novel. I am chagrined that I never read any of his short stories that probably deserve a collection rather than being hidden in a variety of magazine. I could hardly put this book down. I had to force myself not to rush, but to savory the every changing story. I am amazed at how much life, depth and truth this young writer could put into such a diverse collection of characters. I am 67 years old, have been a police officer and worked in the legal profession. In those years it seems I've run into everyone of those character's doppelganger. This immensely talented writer seems to have encountered these characters in half of that lifetime. If they come from his imagination he has insight beyond the norm. His tale is fast paced and never rings false. The motivations and fractured thinking of the characters is disturbingly real. Ask any large metropolitan police officer.

William Beckerley
San Carlos, CA.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A well written depressing atmospheric psychological crime thriller., October 20, 2007

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pyres (Hardcover)

Fifteen years old Lucia Moberg gets her dad to take her to the nearby mall. Once there Lucia steals a CD from a store for her friend, but almost was caught. In a bit of a panic, she convinces her dad that it is time to leave so they go to the car. However, a man with a gun demands her dad turn over his wallet and the car keys. As she horribly watches her dad refuse to cooperate, the man shoots her father in the head splattering his brains all over the windshield and elsewhere.

Rochester PD Detective Greta Hurd interrogates the teen and quickly rejects the carjacking scenario as a lie. Instead she widens the investigation to Lucia's frightened mother, the neighbor, and the Skeleton Crew gang. As Lucia struggles with her guilt, Great keeps prodding at her to tell the truth as she assumes this was crime of passion caused by a dysfunctional family; sort of like her own.

This is a dark character study that grips the audience as the two lead protagonists, the cop and the teen, struggle with person demons that intrude on the case. Lucia is overloaded with guilt as she goes through one what if drill after another, but always comes back to same reality that she can depend on no one especially not her mom as she accepts culpability and tries to move on although the cop won't let. Greta sees the case through the myopic lens of her own dysfunction family so assumes either the teen or the mom killed the dad. PYRES is a well written depressing atmospheric psychological crime thriller.

Harriet Klausner