Buzz Cut (Thorn Series #5)

by James W. Hall, James W. Hall

Overview

A brutal hijacker,

A missing heiress,

And a luxury liner racing toward disaster...

In the quiet shallows of the Florida Keys, Thorn has made a home, tying fishing flies and trying to forget the violence of his past. Now Key Largo is his world. He fishes it, breathes it, makes love in it. Until a phone call from Miami changes everything plunging Thorn into the deep waters of madness and revenge...

In Miami, Thorn's best friend, Sugarman, is fighting for his life. While working security for a luxury liner plagued by theft, Sugarman was attacked by a man with a knife in one hand and 400,000 volts of electricity in the other. And when the M.S. Eclipse sets sail for the Caribbean, both Thorn and Sugarman are swept into a voyage of terror...where a madman hijacks the Eclipse, killing off crew members one by one...where the cruise line owner's missing daughter reappears, igniting the killer's passions—and Thorn's battered heart...where hundreds of lives hang in the balance, as only Thorn stands between a madman's rage and the ultimate carnage at sea...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780440217824
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/10/1997
Series:	Thorn Series , #5
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	4.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

James Hall, a former art critic of the Guardian, was awarded the first Bernard Denvir Prize for an outstanding young critic. He is the author of 20 novels, 14 of which feature Thorn, the off-the-grid loner who lives a primitive existence in Key Largo, Florida. Thorn and his friend Sugarman, an African-American PI, team up to solve exotic crimes from animal smuggling to piracy to kidnapping to espionage. Hall has won the Edgar Award and the Shamus and several of his novels have been optioned for film.

Read an Excerpt

In his official Fiesta Cruise Lines shirt, Emilio Sanchez stood before the bathroom mirror squinting at his new tummy bulge.  The blue rugby shirt was hugging him tight at the belly, showing off the extra couple of inches of flab.

What it was, was too much cruise line food for the last six months.  First time in his life he'd had a chance to eat three meals a day.  Here he was, only twenty-four years old, way too young to get a gut.  He didn't watch out, soon he'd be looking like all those American passengers.  Worse than that, with a big gringo belly he wasn't as likely to score with the ladies.

Emilio was sucking in his stomach, staring at his profile when the door to his cabin opened.  Tindu, his Filipino roommate, probably ducking in from the first dinner seating for a quick smoke.

Emilio smoothed his hand over his stomach, flattened it briefly, and decided tomorrow he would begin a diet.  Eliminate breakfast.  That would be easiest. Eat two meals a day instead of three.  Drop ten pounds by the time of the anniversary cruise.  No problem.  An easy decision.  Sex was a hell of a lot more important to Emilio Sanchez than breakfast.

He ran a quick comb through his thick black hair and turned from the mirror and the first thing he saw was the glitter of the blade.  It was not a large knife. He'd seen bigger.  Four times in his life he'd faced knives.  Taking cuts on both arms and one deep wound to his left shoulder.  But in those Juarez street fights, he had always possessed his own knife.

The man in his doorway held the knife in a comfortable underhand grip, left hand.  Nothing fancy.  Clearly familiar with its use.

"The shirt," the man said.

"What? "

The man stepped closer.  "I want that shirt."

"You want my shirt?" Emilio plucked some fabric at his breast.  "This shirt?"

"I want it.  Give it to me."

He did something with the knife, a little Zorro waggle of his hand.  Then he held up his right hand and Emilio blinked.  Couldn't believe what he was seeing here in his own room.  A guy with electricity coming out his fingers.  Knife in one hand, sparks coming out the fingertips of the other.

"Hey, man, it's okay.  You want the shirt, you got the shirt.  You can put the goddamn knife away.  I give you the shirt, it's yours, man.  I never liked the fucking shirt in the first place."

Emilio stepped back, pulled the shirttail out of his pants, crossed his hands over his stomach ready to drag it off over his head, watching the man.  "You want it, what, like for a souvenir or something?"

"I need the shirt." Saying it very calm.  "Like right now."

The man wore a black Fiesta Cruise Lines T-shirt and a pair of new blue jeans. The T-shirt said he'd been a Jackpot winner.  The man looked like a movie star, not the super handsome type, but one of those you've seen all your life, in this and in that, the star's brother or best friend.  You've seen him a hundred times, but you never know his name.  One of those.

Blond hair hanging loose down to his shoulders.  A face that looked like the guy might've been playing with his girlfriend's makeup.  Lips a little too red, skin a pasty, powdery white.  Like you could take a fingernail and scrape some of it off, get down to the real flesh.  But still handsome, and despite the knife, still somebody it looked like you could reason with.

"I got more shirts if you want them.  In my drawer over there.  I got three or four, man.  Brand new practically.  You go and take them all.  Start your own collection.  I don't give a shit.  I never liked these fucking shirts."

Still gripping his shirttails, arms crossed, ready to strip off the shirt, but trying to talk his way past this, find some way to keep from ducking his head into that blue material, lose sight of the guy in his doorway for even a half second.  That knife not moving, just hanging there in front of the guy's belly. The blond man very still, not blinking, nothing.

"Go on, take off the shirt." Voice getting quiet now.

Emilio shifted his feet, brought his right one back a half step, gonna kick the man in the groin if he came forward at all.  Punt him up to the Promenade Deck if he tried anything.

Emilio tugged on the shirt, made a little feint to see if the guy moved.  He didn't.  So Emilio went ahead, stripped out of it.  Losing sight of the guy for a half second was all it was, a half second, couldn't have been any longer than that.

The shirt came over his head and Emilio felt a cold jiggle in his belly, and something hot spilling out, running wet down his pants, and he heard the noise coming from his throat, like he was gargling, or puking, like he was out in the alley behind the Kentucky Club back in Juarez, too much cheap tequila, drinking in that bar he remembered now, a place where men stood and guzzled beer and opened their flies right there, a beer in their hand, and pissed into the ceramic trough that ran under the lip of the bar and through a pipe out into the street, a river of urine running down the gutters of Juarez.  Thinking of that bar, of that border town, how much he'd wanted to escape that river of piss, go away, see the world, wear nice clothes, meet the blond women, only so he could wind up like this, in a tiny, pathetic fucking room on a ship, a man killing him for his shirt, for his stupid goddamn shirt.

And Emilio felt himself falling backward against the sink.  Seeing the man in his doorway, holding the blue cruise lines shirt in one hand and the bloody knife in the other.  No smile on his face, nothing at all.  Same look Emilio felt on his own face at that exact moment.  Nothing there at all.  Never would be again either.  Never.  Just like the blond guy, a dead face.

What People are Saying About This

James Crumley

Jim Hall is one of the best thriller writers of our time.

Phillip Margolin

A slick, action-packed read.

Dean Koontz

Unfailingly gripping...explodes with the brillance of chain lightning.

Editorial Reviews

"Hall's Best Suspenser Yet!"
—Chicago Tribune

"A page-turning action thriller. . . will leave readers breathless."
—Ann Arbor News

"Powerful."
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A slick, action-packed read."
—Phillip Margolin, author of After Dark

"Jim Hall is brilliant and Buzz Cut proves it."
—Robert B. Parker, author of All Our Yesterdays

"Another Winner!"
—Library Journal

"Spectacular action."
—Publishers Weekly

"We'd best accept the inevitable: Hall's ship has come in."
—Booklist

From the Publisher

A poet as well as a thriller writer, Hall (Gone Wild, etc.) brings an ear for language and an eye for the evocative detail, for the surge of meaning within sound and surface, to his latestwhich features his customary hero, the moody, middle-aged Thorn. Reuniting with Thorn here is his old friend Sugarman (last seen in Mean High Tide). Bizarre family dysfunction and impending ecological disaster prove familiar but still effective Hall motifs as Sugar signs on as head of security for a billion-dollar Miami-based cruise ship line and Thorn encounters an unusually chilling adversary. Sugar's task is to catch a chimerical murderer whose victims all have some relationship to the company's gambling flagship, the M.S. Eclipse, from which the criminal has been stealing $50,000 per month. Danger promptly surfaces, as Sugar is nearly killed by the psychopathic Butler Jack, who has stun-gun electrodes attached to his fingertips and who plans to hold the Eclipse and its passengers hostage for a king's ransom. Jack also has designs on Monica Sampson, the long-missing daughter of the cruise line's owner, but Thorn, who winds up aboard the ship along with Sugar, casts eyes toward this young beauty as well. Murder, techno-wizardry and plenty of sexual tension ignite into spectacular action as Jack sets the ship on a collision course toward an oil-laden supertanker off Miami's South Beach. The title is right on; this thriller will slice readers' sleep into slivers. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hall's enigmatic hero, Thorn, was last seen parrying poachers in the best-selling Gone Wild (LJ 2/15/95). Now, he finds himself on a cruise ship with a cunning terrorist who plans on blowing the boat out of the wateralong with a good chunk of Florida coastline.

Library Journal

Why does Florida bring out the twisted, surreal side of some of our finest crime writers? Perhaps it's a product of the state's schizophrenia: a sanitized, climate-controlled, theme-park paradise, on the one hand, and an art-deco jungle, on the other hand. In "Native Tongue" (1991), Carl Hiaasen imagined a kind of Armageddon set in a theme park, and now James W. Hall has turned a cruise ship into a floating nightmare. When Thorn, Hall's beach-bum hero perpetually in flight from the vacuousness of the American Dream, finds himself onboard a luxury cruise ship called the "Eclipse", you know the world is somehow off kilter. Intending to help out his pal Sugarman, head of the ship's security force, Thorn soon finds himself up against a techno-psycho intent on steering the "Eclipse" into the path of an oil tanker. With enough gadgetry to please Clancy fans, the gut-level narrative drive of a disaster novel, and the creepiest bad guy since Hannibal Lecter, Hall's latest has "breakout novel" written all over it. Fortunately, the more subtle pleasures of the Thorn series have not been completely obscured by the high-concept plot: there's some intriguingly detailed, Ross McDonaldlike rummaging through the psychological skeletons in a few familial closets; there's plenty of amusing interplay between the reclusive Thorn, who's never seen "Love Boat", and the talk-show-fanatic Sugarman; and, of course, there's a bizarre strain of black humor that's just right for a cruise from Hell. Thorn devotees may be reluctant to share their introverted hero with hordes of techno-thriller fans, but we'd best accept the inevitable: Hall's ship has come in.

Bill Ott

A fiendishly clever saboteur goes up against the uninspired defenders of the Fiesta Cruise Lines in the seventh of Hall's increasingly overblown action fantasies.

Butler Jack has a passion for etymology, an integral stun gun installed on his fingers, a consuming hatred of Fiesta mogul Morton Sampson, and a plan to bring Sampson to his knees via a demand for a $58 million ransom he wants to donate to charity. To feed his hundreds of foster kids the world over, Butler plans to override the autopilots of the Fiesta cruise ship Eclipse and Sampson's behemoth, pathetically vulnerable oil tanker Juggernaut. To carry out this James Bond plot, he needs the unwitting help of the hopeless love of his youth, Sampson's missing daughter Monica. Monica, who ran away from Daddy and his dirty millions three years ago to settle down as buzz-cut Florida maid Irma Slater, readily rises to Butler's bait even as Hall's hero Thorn, who comes across more and more like Travis McGee guest-lecturing in Philosophy 101, and his sidekick Sugarman are coming on board Eclipse to foil Butler. But wait! How can either grizzled Sugarman or disillusioned Monica stop Butler when they're actually his own brother and sister? These twisted relationships ought to be the heart of the book, but they fizzle, because Hall (Gone Wild, 1995, etc.), who pumps up his characters to near-mythic status when he first introduces them, tends to neglect them thereafter, and they shrivel like demigods with a slow leak. So you're left with smiling, venal Sampson determined to keep the lid on Butler's murderous sabotage to protect the p.r. for the cruise, a showcase for his TV star wife Lola, Butler's mom; Butler snaking through the ship zapping everybody who gets too close; and Thorn and Sugar spouting manly wisdom like ninjas on Oprah.

Butler's a villain worthy of the grotesques in Dick Tracy, but the rest of the cast, including the hero, don't seem any more interested in the familiar plot than you're likely to be.

Kirkus Reviews