All the Rage (Repairman Jack) (Mass Market Paperback)

by F. Paul Wilson (Author) "This is crazy." Macintosh said..." (more)
Key Phrases: dry lab, diabetes clinic, protection committee, Milos Dragovic, Tom Terrific, Long Island (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Reading a Repairman Jack novel seems, at times, a guilty pleasure; it's astonishingly easy to inhale the pages, like eating potato chips. A firm-jawed Mr. Fixit hero with a cryptic past--crunch! Crimes that go beyond (way, waaay beyond) the norms of traditional law--smack! A liberal sprinkling of screwball comedy and nasty supernatural beings--now that's tasty! Good, crispy fun, indeed. But F. Paul Wilson's tight plotting and appealing characters manage to elevate potato chips to the realm of haute cuisine (or at least a satisfyingly solid meal), and his latest, All the Rage, is no exception.

Everything's rosy when Nadia Radzminsky takes a dream research job at GEM Pharmaceuticals: she'll be working for her professional idol, Dr. Luc Monnet; her fiancé is one of GEM's top salespeople; she's got all sorts of high tech toys to play with; and she'll get a million-dollar bonus if she can just figure out how to stabilize GEM's most promising molecule (dubbed, ominously enough for students of Norse mythology, Loki). But clouds quickly appear on the horizon in the form of Milos Dragovic, a Serbian mobster with a short fuse, a big wallet, and a profound interest in Loki's future. Nadia suspects Milos is blackmailing her boss, and she hires Jack to find out what's going on.

What Jack finds out isn't pretty: Loki is leading an underground life as Berzerk, a hot, new street drug that brings out the user's most aggressive behavior, frequently with deadly consequences. And Milos may be pushing Monnet around, but the good doctor isn't objecting too strongly to the payoff. But when Jack gets closer to the source of the mystery molecule, events take a very personal turn: Loki is derived from the blood of rakoshi, those otherworldly and decidedly vicious demons Jack had sworn to exterminate in Conspiracies. With his family threatened by both the rakoshi and the vengeful Serb, Jack must take on both the monster and the mob.

All the Rage has the necessary ingredients for success, including a snarkily amusing subplot involving a Brooklyn junkyard owner who's also out for Milos's blood (Jack has to keep toning down his client's eager revenge plots, and his substitution of industrial sludge for knives in one such plan is particularly amusing). Dedicated Wilson fans will rejoice in the new addition to the series, and neophytes will scramble to unearth the earlier installments. --Kelly Flynn --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Wilson's conscientious urban mercenary, Repairman Jack, debuted in The Tomb (1984), which was a national bestseller and later a film. Neither Wilson nor Jack are quite the draw they were then, and so Jack's fourth novel-length adventure probably won't hit general lists, though it will do well on specialized ones. Jack takes personal assignments that subtly reflect larger, more pervasive problems in the body politic. In his spellbinding new outing - the most intricate and energetically plotted since The Tomb - he tackles the rising tide of aggressive behavior inundating contemporary society. When he takes a retainer from research chemist Nadia Razminsky to investigate the shady relationship between Dr. Luc Monnet and expatriate Serbian gangster Milos Dragovic, Jack knows that Dragovic has bought into the American dream with millions made in illicit drug trafficking. Through a series of intrigues that cut perilously close to home and threaten longtime girlfriend Gia and her daughter, Vicky, he discovers that GEM Pharma, Monnet's private pharmaceutical company and Nadia's employer, is supplying Dragovic with a designer super-steroid (sold on the street as "Berzerk") that boosts bestial behavior in its users. En route to vanquishing the villains with an actual taste of their own medicine, Jack must save the lives of Nadia and her lover, confront the sideshow monster whose blood supplies the drug and recover from an accidental dosing that sends him on an uncharacteristic - but thrillingly sustained - egomaniacal rampage through New York City. Wilson (Conspiracies) skillfully juggles subplots whose unpredictable collisions and complications further accelerate the relentless momentum of Jack's