cover image Viva La Madness

Viva La Madness

J.J. Connolly. Overlook, $25.95 (448p) ISBN 978-1-59020-859-5

Set in 2001, Connolly’s follow-up to his well-received debut, Layer Cake (2001), offers plenty of violence, graphic sex, and coarse, colorful language, but little else. The unnamed narrator, who lives in Jamaica, agrees to meet his old sidekick, Mister Mortimer, in Barbados. Mortimer, who brings along psychotic Sonny King and paranoid Twitchy Roy Burns, pitches a return to England as a salesman on commission for a drug dealer’s “product,” which King distributes through his channels. In England, King and Burns rob, torture, and kill a Venezuelan courier connected to a powerful drug family who was carrying a hidden flash drive loaded with important data. This brutal act brings two opposing groups of South Americans bent on finding and retrieving the drive—and spurs King and company to do the same. That the narrator tries to act as the voice of reason amid shifting alliances and betrayals will strike some readers as odd since he knew from early on that these people were unreliable, untrustworthy, and unstable. (May)