cover image Purgatory

Purgatory

Monty Mickelson. St. Martin's Press, $18.95 (284pp) ISBN 978-0-312-08877-4

A crack on the skull and stolen drug money set antihero narrator Danny Castellano on a journey of revenge in this entertaining thriller. First novelist Mickelson's influences range from 1950s pulp to New Age thought, yet he makes this diversity work. A bag man for a Hispanic drug mob, Danny launders money by making deposits in banks throughout the Southwest. His boss, Luis, orders him to take on a partner, Tommy Delorme, who promptly gets the drop on Danny and leaves him for dead in the Arizona desert, absconding with $350,000 of the gang's money. Did Luis set him up, or is Tommy Delorme a freelancer? As Danny searches for the answer to these questions, the action moves swiftly and sometimes brutally from Arizona to Alaska. There he teams up with Carl Dupree, an ex-cellmate of Tommy Delorme's who has a revenge motive of his own, and with the aura-reading Indigo, a former drug user who sets him on the path of righteousness. From Alaska the trail and plot get hot in New Orleans and the Yucatan Peninsula, where drug dealers converge like sharks on the money and what it can purchase--a shipload of ether used to process cocaine. In the best page-turning tradition, this book twists and turns right up to its bizarre yet believable ending. (Mar.)