Shelf Sample: Beat the Reaper

This is the way to start the new year--read an outrageous, shocking, darkly humorous thriller, with footnotes, no less. Ever so much better than starting a diet and workout program. And Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316032223/0316032220, January 7, 2009) is just the book. Peter Brown is an ER doctor at Manhattan Catholic Hospital, perhaps not the situation one would expect for a guy in the Witness Protection Program. However, hiding out in plain sight from the New Jersey mob, where he used to be a hit man (aka "the Bearclaw"), has worked until the day his past and his present meet in a terminally ill patient. His morning starts like this:

So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some f***head tries to mug me! Naturally there's a gun. He comes up behind me and sticks it into the base of my skull. It's cold, and it actually feels sort of good, in an acupressure kind of way. "Take it easy, Doc," he says.

Which explains that, at least. Even at five in the morning, I'm not the kind of guy you mug. I look like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman. But the f***head can see the blue scrub pants under my overcoat, and the ventilated plastic green clogs, so he thinks I've got drugs and money on me. And maybe that I've taken some kind of oath not to kick his f***head ass for trying to mug me.

I barely have enough drugs and money to get me through the day. And the only oath I took, as I recall, was to first do no harm. I'm thinking we're way past that point.

"Okay," I say, raising my hands.

The rat and the pigeon run away. Chickenshits.

I turn around. It rolls the gun off my skull and leaves my raised right hand above the f***head's arm. I wrap his elbow and jerk upward, causing the ligaments to pop like champagne corks.

After he rearranges the thug's anatomy, he shoulders him to take him to the ER. As he does so, a gun falls onto the ground.

I should throw it out. Bend the barrel and drop it down a storm drain.

Instead, I slip it into the back pocket of my scrub pants.

Old habits die harder than that.

And then his day really goes downhill. --selected by Marilyn Dahl