Surfing, high finance, a stay-at-home dad--the seemingly unrelated main ingredients of A Rough Way to Go, Sam Garonzik's debut, have likely never before been combined in a thriller. But even if they have been, it's impossible to imagine that another writer could have cooked up something so fiendishly clever with them.
Narrator Pete Greene is the at-home parent for his and his breadwinner wife's toddler, Luke. They live in a beach town outside New York City; Pete surfs to interrupt the tedium of parenting. One day, news gets around that a male body in a wetsuit has washed up on the beach; the surfboard leash tied to his ankle has snapped. When the papers report the story--the dead man is finance bigwig Robert Townsend--Pete realizes that he knew the guy: on the day Townsend went missing, he and Pete had spoken on the beach and agreed that the waves were crap. So why would Townsend have gone surfing that day? Pete isn't buying the surfing-accident angle. He gets nowhere with the police, so he decides to play detective, sometimes while exhibiting creative morality, often with "my assistant" (Luke) in tow.
At first Garonzik seems to be going for an underdog's-revenge story, but he pursues something trickier. Readers should stay on high alert: even scenes that seem diversionary have a way of ultimately fortifying the plot, which concludes blindsidingly. A Rough Way to Go should be shelved with the darkest noir, its surfer-bro everyman surely crime fiction's first. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer