Customer Reviews

Pyres

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

Excellent book! Greg Isles should pick up a copy and refresh his memory on how to write a killer story! A well crafted novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat while not bowing down to trite, overdone mechanisms. Very fresh tale! Highly recommended, and I will be looking forward to future books from Derek Nikitas! This mystery/thriller digs deep to be a very human story about dealing with grief and recovering from life's disappointments.

About eight years ago, an unknown author writing under the name of "Boston Teran" scorched the pages with "God is a Bullet", a brilliantly disturbing novel of child abduction, survival, and retribution set in southern California's feral western wastelands. Not since this blistering debut have I read a novel as provocative as Derek Nikitas' "Pyres", the story of a young teen launched from adolescence to adulthood in a few short winter weeks, the unwitting and unsuspecting victim caught in a web of dysfunctional families and despicable deeds. The lives of four women collide in Nikitas' masterpiece, Lucia "Luc" Moberg, the teen who sees her professor father murdered in an apparent botched murder, Luc's mother Blair, Tanya, the trailer trash mom-to-be running with the wrong crowd, and Greta, the hardened detective of the Rochester, New York PD with psychological baggage of her own drug around Luc's brutal coming-of-age journey. But if you're thinking this is sounding like "Steel Magnolias", think again, for there's no "chick lit" in these pages; a raw and violent nightmare of irony and emotion that twists and turns to an almost believable and infinitely entertaining climax.

Setting the young Nikitas far above the pop fiction crowd is his beautifully descriptive writing and carefully molded characters, including the loathsome "Skeleton Crew" motorcycle crew, the "baddest" set of lowlifes I've come across since Teran's Cyrus and his Left-Handed Path rampaged the desserts of "God is a Bullet". These guys would fit in nicely with either Jerry Springer or Charles Manson, thugs you'll hope you never meet but know are out there lurking in those cinder block bars with parking lots full of chopped Harleys and broken beer bottles. But Nikitas' talents reach far beyond simple mayhem, succeeding in getting inside the head of a teenage girl who discovers the depth of her relationship with her father, and sees it strengthen after his murder.

Remember the name - Derek Nikitas. This is American crime fiction about as good as it gets, a powerful lesson of literature and life that should not be missed.

Fast-paced, gripping, and deeply satisfying. Nikitas is the real deal.
Read it.

Julianna Baggott
www.juliannabaggott.com

This was a terrific book - perhaps a little bleak in parts, but cleanly written and well plotted. I raced through the ending, too. Hope he writes another.

You are 15 years old, and a bit rebellious. You see your father die, shot in the car by an unknown assailant. Your mother loses it, and tries to commit suicide.

What do you do. What DO you do?

Pyres, by Derek Nikitas, tries to get into the mind of Lucia ("Luc") Moberg, the girl put in this situation. At the same time, Nikitas goes into the mind of the homicide cop investigating the shooting, the shooter, and the shooter's very pregnant girlfriend.

They all come together at the end.

Now, I need to be careful here to not give the mystery plot away. Luc's father's death was not a random act of violence. It was very calculated. In fact, it was so calculated that Luc ends up being kidnapped to... clear up loose ends. This was my difficulty with this story. The bad guys had gotten away with murder. And somehow they believed kidnapping Luc was going to make their get-away easier?

Sometimes you have to cut your losses and run. Criminals do this all the time. You hear the sirens, you see headlights, and you leave without the big score. But in Pyres, the bad guys (and they are truly bad), keep at it.

This book has intriguing plots within plots, twists, and very imperfect people. Four stars out of five.

Punky, nearly sixteen year old Lucia (Luc) Moberg may have become distant from her family - what teen isn't - but she still loved her Swedish, English professor father Oscar. She can't get it out of her mind that if she had not insisted on having him take her to the mall in Rochester, NY, and then having to exit quickly after stealing some CDs, that her father would not have been confronted in the car in the parking lot and shot dead.

But investigator Greta Hurd with the Rochester PD starts uncovering evidence of the involvement of a motorcycle gang, whose members take degeneracy to a new level. The role of Lucia's mother Blair is difficult to ascertain because she has become mentally impaired after two suicide attempts. But there is a puzzling video of her having a confrontation with a customer at Shop-Mor, where she works as a low-level manager.

Beyond the over-the-top cruelty of the gang members to others and to each other, the book is best at exploring the psychological state of not only Lucia and Greta, but also Tanya, a pregnant, motorcycle momma. These women/girls are forced to constantly cope with very challenging situations and revelations as well as their own demons.

The author apparently has a Swedish mythology interest, as Swedish mythical and magical beings are often on Luc's mind, instilled by her father's bedtime stories. While the author has created some sympathetic characters, the story has its improbabilities, not the least of which is the involvement of a professor's family with a gang of degenerates. Not unexpectedly, there is a certain amount of violence, yet the story gets a little bogged down at times. Overall, this is a very good first novel.