Order FOUR DAYS here
"Why does anyone leave Cairns?"
"To get away from the people live here."
I have a confession to make: unlike several other reviewers, I take a perverse pleasure in reading about white men, as long as they're antagonizing other white men in the narrative. It's not my only interest in literature (not by far), but it's something I enjoy reading about. The reason is simple: it almost blurs the line between good and evil by default because white men are a universal antagonist figure. We're easy to hate for understandable historical reasons: we've killed, raped and enslaved just about everybody else since the beginning of time.
A novel that went above and beyond the call of duty of white men apocalypse is Austalian author Iain Ryan's debut novel FOUR DAYS, which will be released by Broken River Books this week. It's a vile and corrosive slow burn that slides down the pipe like a spiked glass of bourbon.
Jim Harris used to be on the Brisbane police force. He was making his way up the ladder of the most corrupted police force in Australia when an unfortunate situation had him sent in exile back in his hometown of Cairns. Harris wants nothing more than to escape the town he first ran away to Brisbane to, but that involves buying his way back in the good graces of his superior Barry Caller, but once you've fucked up it's never the same anymore and when a murder investigation lands on Harris' desk as soon as he's back in Brisbane, of course the evidence points right at his old friends. Harris has then to decide if he really wants his old life back of if he wants to bury it.
I tend to have cold feet with crime novels set in foreign locations. They often emphasize the sense of place and I lose patience with them if I don't know the locale because I don't read to travel. FOUR DAYS is great in that regards because it happens in two Australian cities, but it could really have happened in any city in the world. Aside for a handful of colloquialisms it would be difficult to know it's happening in Australia at all. FOUR DAYS is lean and mean, it knows what it is and what it wants its audience to feel. Don't get cold feet on this one because you don't know Brisbane, you don't need to.
''Fuck off," she said.
"Come on, Linda. What does it matter? You talk to us, and you'll be home in an hour."
She started crying. Harris felt the contents of his stomach rise. He took the handle of the food hatch and slammed it opened and closed a few times.
"Linda. If you have something to say you better fucking say it because I'm happy to let you rot in there until you're spraying yourself all over from both ends. Whatever you have to fucking say, just say it."
"You can't do that?" she shouted. Harris rattled the hatch again. "Here comes the hose, Linda, fuck you."
I can't say FOUR DAYS is a very original novel, it's just a tremendously well-executed one. It's not the first or the last novel about crooked cops, but Iain Ryan nailed why the trope is fascinating: if the law doesn't separate the good guys from the bad, what a cop would do with almost infinite power over people is the only beacon of morality left and let's just say FOUR DAYS is not a righteousness contest. Jim Harris is not your shield wearing white knight, he's a damned soul fighting against impossible odds for the legacy he wants to leave in this world.
Author Iain Ryan described FOUR DAYS as a James Ellroy-inspired minimalist murder mystery on Broken River Podcast, which raised a couple green flags for me right off the bat. It turned out to be a very accurate description of his novel and it was a great one on top of that. I've had a blast reading FOUR DAYS. It's a hardboiled and fatalistic mystery about a cop that sold his own soul down the river. I read a lot of stuff that is self-defined as hardboiled every year, but this is one of the best I've read in 2015. I'll say it: Iain Ryan is a star and FOUR DAYS is a brutal debut novel that you won't be able to pry yourself away from.
Author Iain Ryan described FOUR DAYS as a James Ellroy-inspired minimalist murder mystery on Broken River Podcast, which raised a couple green flags for me right off the bat. It turned out to be a very accurate description of his novel and it was a great one on top of that. I've had a blast reading FOUR DAYS. It's a hardboiled and fatalistic mystery about a cop that sold his own soul down the river. I read a lot of stuff that is self-defined as hardboiled every year, but this is one of the best I've read in 2015. I'll say it: Iain Ryan is a star and FOUR DAYS is a brutal debut novel that you won't be able to pry yourself away from.
