“Chase’s first day on the job they took the sobbing chauffeur out back, gutted him, then handed Chase the cap and the little white gloves.”
Chase goes to work for a mob family who’s star is falling in order to rob them. It’s dangerous but he needs money if he’s going to steal his grandfather’s daughter to save the child from going up in the bent life as he did.
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TITLE:
THE COLDEST MILE
WRITER:
by Tom Piccirilli
SERIES:
The Chase Series #2
GENRE:
Noir, Thriller.
DESCRIPTORS:
Crime, Criminals, Outlaws, Deputy Sheriff, Getaway Driver, Revenge, The Bent Life, Grifters, Robbers, Murderers, A String, Mobsters, Organized Crime,
CHARACTERS
Chase, He spent most of his childhood with Jonah, and is a talented driver.
Jonah, Sixty-five years old, a career criminal — a thief and cold blooded killer.
Deputy Sheriff Lila Bodeen, Chase’s dead wife who still talks to him.
Kylie, Angie and Jonah’s child — the child Chase feels compelled to rescue.
Sherry Langan, She wants to be the head of the Langan family.
Bishop, The Langan’s gunman.
Hildy, A grifter who is no match for Chase . . . or is she?
SUMMARY:
You’d think that with Lila’s death avenged, her voice would stop talking to Chase, but it doesn’t. Now she wants him to rescue the infant daughter of Chase’s grandfather — Kylie. To spare the child from growing up in the bent life — as he had — Chase would risk confronting Jonah to save Kylie. To do that, however, he needed money — a nice big score.
To get that money, Chase accepts a driving job with The Langan family — a mob family that is on the decline. The don is dying and both the son, Jackie, and daughter, Sherry, both wanted to take over. Acting as a chauffeur, wasn’t what he was expecting to do, but it allowed him to case the property, looking for the valuables.
The job, however, is an ill fit, time is running out and it’s made worse by the fact that Chase unintentionally alienates Sherry Langan in staying faithful to Lila.
“You mean to tell me that you guys heist dresses?”
When Chase does finish his business with the Langan Family he heads down South to Florida where Kylie’s mother Angela once said she was from. But when he tracks down Angela’s sister, the woman who left Kaylie with, he discovers he’s already too late. The family is dead or missing and Kaylie is gone. It was efficient and brutal and Chase can see that it has Jonah’s fingerprints all over it.
To find Jonah and Kaylie, Chase will have to immerse himself in the Florida underworld — starting with a small time string and working his way up until hopeful, he finds his grandfather.
To make matters worse, the Langan family is not done with Chase.
APPEAL:
The story is narrated by Chase, in first person past tense. Since this is not a supernatural story, the reader may assume that to hear Chase’s voice, one could assume Chase survived. That may indeed be the case (although Tom Piccirilli wrote award winning horror for years before taking up crime stories) but the suspense is still palatable. Chase has more to lose than his life — his humanity is on the line as is the life of a child he hasn’t met — yet.
The story is a dark and gritty noir tale — the protagonist is a career criminal who leaves the life only for Lila and easily returns when she is killed in the line of duty. Yet he has a strong code of honor, a moral system that may let him rob but tries to avoid hurting or killing people. However, in his line of work, sooner or later somebody gets hurt.
“Never follow someone else’s rules.”
Chase may be a protagonist you can root for but Tom Piccirilli doesn’t make him a nice person. Just when you get comfortable with Chase, he jars you — with curtness, a bit of ruthlessness, his inability to trust (except Lila) and so on. You never hate Chase but you’re never sure you could like him. It’s difficult to write that kind of gray character but Piccirilli makes it look easy. And Jonah — unlike many stories with supposedly scary secondary characters that never prove their worth — this one truly lives up to the author’s billing.
This story has two major parts: Chase trying to score off the Langan family and Chase hunting down Kaylie. They may feel like two very different stories but they’re related and they come together when it’s time.
NOTES:
This is the beginning of a series. Tom Piccirilli has written that he has envisioned at least three novels but more could follow if the market demands. Currently the sequel, The Coldest Mile is out and is a worthy successor to The Cold Spot.
READALIKES:
If you enjoy The Coldest Mile, you might want to try a crime fiction book like The Grifter’s Game, A Diet of Treacle, Lucky at Cards and The Girl with the Long Green Heart all recently reprinted noir novels from the earlier part of Lawrence Block’s writing career.
Another author you might enjoy is Jim Thompson. His novel The Grifters was made into a motion picture. You can also check out The Golden Gizmo, The Criminal, Savage Night, and The Killer inside Me. A final recommendation would be Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s which contains 5 novels that helped give shape to the noir genre: The Killer inside Me by Jim Thompson, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Pick-Up by Charles Willeford, Down There by David Goodis and The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes.
