cover image Torsos

Torsos

John Peyton Cooke. Mysterious Press, $19.95 (359pp) ISBN 978-0-89296-522-9

Not for the faint-hearted or squeamish, Cooke's fact-based thriller takes a graphic look at a seamy side of 1930s Cleveland. A serial killer stalks male prostitutes and vagrants during Eliot Ness's post-Chicago tenure as Safety Commissioner. In-the-closet cop Hank Lambert recognizes the head lying near other parts of a dismembered body as that of homosexual pimp Eddie Andrassy, the first of many butchered corpses to be found in Cleveland's grimy Kingsbury Run section over the next five years. Lambert's association with a young male hooker with a heart of gold reveals the gay life of the period and eventually leads to the rich, politically well-connected killer, who taunts Ness by leaving gift-wrapped body parts closer and closer to his headquarters. Some readers will be offended by the explicit and kinky sex (notably a bathhouse episode involving a trucker and a chicken), and the ending is an into-the-sunset contrivance, but the talented Cooke ( Out for Blood ) has pulled an interesting switch by casting male characters in the classic women-in-peril roles of a typical slasher novel. (Jan.)