Beat the Reaper: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: attending rounds, instruments nurse, David Locano, Kurt Limme, Chief Resident (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Making a hit man turned medical intern a sympathetic figure would be a tall order for most authors, but first-time novelist Bazell makes it look easy in this breezy and darkly comic suspense novel. The Locanos, a mob family, take in 14-year-old Pietro Brwna (pronounced Browna) after a couple of thugs gun down the grandparents who raised him in their New Jersey home. Bent on revenge, Pietro pursues the killers and executes them a year later. Impressed by Pietros performance, David Locano recruits Pietro as a hit man. After more traumas, Pietro tries to make a break from his past by entering the witness protection program. Now known as Peter Brown, he eventually lands a position as a doctor at a decrepit Manhattan hospital, where by chance a former Mafia associate turns up as a patient and threatens to rat him out. The hero's wry narrative voice, coupled with Bazells artful use of flashbacks to sustain tension and fill in Pietro's past, are a winning combination. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Beat the Reaper is a hypochondriac's nightmare but a reader's dream. Josh Bazell concocted this comic thriller while working as a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and if anything he describes here is true, we should all become Christian Scientists. After I gulped down the doctor's story, my pulse was racing so fast I didn't know whether to recommend his outrageous first novel or sue for malpractice. Bazell's narrator is known to his patients and colleagues at New York's run-down Manhattan Catholic hospital as Dr. Peter Brown, but his old mafia brothers knew him as Pietro "Bearclaw" Brnwa. He hasn't seen any of those thugs for years, since he fled into the Federal Witness Protection Program and was reborn as a cynical emergency room physician who just happens to look "like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman." Beat the Reaper opens with a mugging, followed by sex in a hospital elevator with a cute drug rep, and then it races along for eight manic hours in what looks like the last day of Peter's career -- and perhaps his life. On early morning rounds, he has to tell a wealthy businessman named Nicholas LoBrutto that he probably has cancer, but when Peter steps into the room, LoBrutto instantly recognizes him as Bearclaw, the mafia assassin who turned state's evidence and vanished. LoBrutto offers him a deal: So long as he stays alive, he won't blow the doctor's cover, but if he dies, the mafia will pounce on their AWOL killer. As if that deadline weren't nerve-wracking enough, Peter accidentally gets stuck by a syringe full of fluid from a patient with a mysterious fever. It's that kind of book: constantly working its butt off to keep our attention, from fights to sex to medical gore, all told at a breakneck pace in the comic voice of a killer-turned-healer. Early on, the novel splits into two storylines. While Peter tries to keep his medical staff from losing LoBrutto to neglect or incompetence, he tells us how he fell in with the mafia during high school to find out who murdered his grandparents. He became a kind of Robin Hood executioner who specialized in the lucrative work of rubbing out the most loathsome criminals, the "truly evil." There's enough male fantasy packed into these pages to temporarily relieve the worst case of mid-life crisis. The flashback scenes are full of hand-to-hand combat and bull's-eye shooting on the fly, along with lots of ironic macho talk of guns and stake-outs. And there are some Nazis, too, of course. What's more, Bazell has the advantage of bringing a physician's knowledge to the mechanics of mayhem: While taking down a guy with a knife, Peter stops momentarily to explain the trajectory of his left hand: "If it hits, it will crush the fragile rings of cartilage that keep his trachea open against the vacuum of breathing in. Next time he tries, his windpipe will clench shut like an anus, leaving him at ReaperTime minus maybe six minutes. Even if I ruin my Propulsatil pen trying to trache him." Bazell's gangster-turned-doctor makes Daniel Craig's James Bond look wussy in comparison. And the female characters in Beat the Reaper -- particularly Peter's sultry European girlfriend -- are about as complex as those traipsing through "Octopussy." Toward the end of the book, there's a love scene so ludicrous that Ian Fleming must be turning gangrene with envy: Flying bullets! Vicious sharks! Oral sex! (Teenage boys and jurors for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, turn directly to p. 268.) The mafia killings are brutal, but Peter's portrait of the hospital culture is even more alarming (and hilarious). Turn your head and cough -- nervously -- but you can't help wondering how much of this Bazell learned on the job. (Ironic footnotes fill in additional morbid details.) Doctors' paranoia about possible legal action rules all their medical decisions, especially how quickly to move barely stabilized patients out of the hospital to meet weekly quotas. When a surgeon tells a patient, "You have a chance," he really means, "I need a slightly longer Chriscraft." A desperate shortage of nurses leads the hospital to hire "mostly bitter and demented" women who seem to have emerged from "the white supremacist cult Nietzsche's sister founded in Paraguay." And all these so-called professionals are always so exhausted and pumped up on narcotics that they work in a mental state no different from extreme inebriation. Not surprisingly, Peter notes, physician-caused and hospital-caused illnesses "are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States." Of course, this is the doctor hero we've adored for years: the cynical iconoclast with a heart of gold who breaks all the rules but saves the patients no one else can. Bazell has sutured together Alan Alda's Capt. Hawkeye and James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano, and so long as he keeps everything operating fast enough, it's too much fun and too much gore to take your eyes off the page. Beware the risk of dependency: This is the first of a planned series, and movie versions aren't far behind.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (January 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316032220
• ISBN-13: 978-0316032223
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (149 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #19,419 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #26 in	Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Medical
  #29 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Medical

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

114 of 136 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 13 Ways of Looking at "Beat the Reaper", January 3, 2009

By	Dmitry Portnoy (Studio City, CA United States) - See all my reviews

1. As if it were a TV show: It's "House" meets the "Sopranos."
2. In historical context: It's the best comic crime fiction debut since Robert Crais's "The Monkey's Raincoat."
3. Through a mourning veil for David Foster Wallace: Greatest footnotes since he died.
4. If you are one of those who only read nonfiction: It will teach you cool stuff about medicine, the Mafia and Auschwitz.
5. In case you like dramatic irony: The violence in it is clinical, the clinical sloppy and vile.
6. As if it were on Facebook: Its friends would be Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless in Brooklyn" and Richard Dooling's "Critical Care," but it would be the funny, outgoing one.
7. On a personal note: It is only the fourth book in my adult life I stayed awake to finish once starting it that night.
8. As if it had already been made into a movie: The book is better.
9. As a bar mitzvah present: Coolest ever.
10. As if flipping through its pages randomly: Did you notice fat men have diagonal creases in their nipples? Who does Michael Corleone imitate when he drops the gun after he shoots the cop? How about an exquisite description of the Hudson in midwinter? There's at least one of these on every page.
11. If you were to judge it by its cover: Don't. It's not Dean Koontz.
12. As an investment; Get the first edition.
13. As if it were the first of many: Please.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars style is substance, January 5, 2009

By	R Candlewood "Bob" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

I love this book. It has tremendous energy right from the first page, and it doesn't let up pretty much the whole way through. It's fast and smart, and I never felt that the author was talking down to me -- he expected me to keep up, and nothing is throw-away, not even the funny footnotes (that are much more than footnotes in the end...). I'm not sure I'd recommend it for my wife, who likes her thrillers a little more civilized. The ending is over-the-top and not for the squeamish. Then again, it's so consistently outrageous and enjoyable that I want her to read it just so I can talk to her about it! It's that kind of book. I can't really think of anything I've read that's like it. Patsy Cornwell? This is way more fun. Tarantino, sure. And "House," maybe. But nothing on the page.

Still, I'd prefer to give it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars, because it isn't perfect; there are some spots that seem a little less polished, some things that are maybe too hard to follow. It's not always smooth. But those are quibbles, because overall, this is the coolest, smartest, most exciting book I've read in YEARS. It's a rush.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Debut Novel..., January 5, 2009

By	Scott "...I Review Stuff..." (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews

This book is definitely worth checking out. It's fun, violent, medically informative, and action-packed. I know it's rather cliche, but this book is honestly very hard to put down. Once you start you'll want to keep going to the brutal end. Josh Bazell has been compared to Chuck Palahniuk. There are definitely aspects of Chuck Palahniuk in his writing. From the heavily detailed medical references to his anti-hero leading character. However his voice and perspective are definitely his own. He offers something new and exciting without coming across as a complete carbon copy of other progressive/alternative/whatever you want to call them/fiction authors. Hurry and read this one before it's turned into a mediocre Hollywood feature film.