In Fresh Kills, the murder of John Sanders, Sr. on a New York street corner reunites his estranged and abused children, John, Jr. and Julia. While Julia struggles to keep things together on the home front, Junior, unhinged by his father's death, searches for the killer across the bleak, haunted landscape of his Staten Island hometown.

Complicating Junior's pursuit are two police detectives: one, a former childhood friend; the other, a veteran cop who might have his own reasons to wish John, Sr. dead. Junior's emotional state crumbles under the pressure coming at him from every side. Bedding his high school sweetheart doesn't exactly simplify the situation. When the opportunity for revenge presents itself, Junior must decide whether he will continue the chain of violence that has nearly destroyed his life, or give in to the possibility of a new beginning.

With emotional intensity, crackling dialogue and a heartfelt sense of place and character, Fresh Kills delivers unexpected and profound insights that speak to the soul of its struggling hero, and heralds a breakthrough voice in fiction.

"Superb prose and psychological insights distinguish Loehfelm's debut. Because Staten Island bartender John Sanders Jr. was regularly physically abused as a child by his father, he reacts at first with indifference to the news that John Senior has been killed, execution style, by an unknown assailant. The death has a greater impact on Sanders's sister, Julia, who returns from Boston to make the necessary arrangements and to attempt to reconnect with her brother to create some sense of family from their mutual childhood trauma. While Sanders channels some of his frustration and anger into a search for answers, the emphasis is on family relationships rather than mystery solving. Loehfelm excels in making Staten Island itself a palpable presence, brilliantly evoking the reek of the world's largest landfill that gives the novel its name, as well as the despair of the local residents. Note: Loehfelm is the winner of Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award, a contest in which PW reviewed manuscript submissions." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Bill Loehfelm's first novel opens with his troubled hero, John Sanders Jr., telling us, "I don't often answer my door with a gun in my hand." But he does just that, because someone is banging on the door, he lives in a tough part of Staten Island, and he's naked in bed with a girlfriend named Molly. The person at the door proves to be a policeman Sanders has known all his life, and he's come to report... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) that John Sanders Sr. has been murdered execution-style in broad daylight on a street near his home. The policeman and his partner, who's also known the Sanders family for decades, vow to find the killer. Sanders himself, although he hates his father and first says he'd like to give the killer a medal, later decides that he, too, wants revenge.

Perhaps I've been reading too much crime fiction, but given this set-up I expected "Fresh Kills" to be, if not a police procedural, at least a novel that would examine why and how the murder came about. But that's not what Loehfelm has in mind. The two cops turn up now and then, but only to report that they've made no progress, and Sanders roughs up a couple of teenagers he thinks may know something, but soon the murder is all but forgotten. Instead, the author gives us a character study of a man of about 30 who has hated his abusive father since childhood. The suspense in the novel, such as it is, is not about whether the killer will be caught but whether Junior, as he's called, can bring himself to attend his father's funeral.

Junior works as a bartender, and besides his father, his preoccupations in life are cigarettes, booze, bar fights and sex. He's just been dumped by Virginia, who worked in a tattoo parlor, and he's consoling himself with Molly, his high school sweetheart, who shares his bed despite her involvement with a dull fellow with a job in Manhattan. Molly is in the great tradition of good-hearted, hot-blooded Mollys that includes the ones in Larry McMurtry's "Leaving Cheyenne" and James Joyce's "Ulysses." By and large, in fiction, a fellow can't go wrong with a Molly. Still, whether this one can tolerate Junior's boozing and ranting is unclear.

The other woman in Junior's life is his sister, Julia, who is a graduate student, a lesbian and pretty much a saint. She's trying to persuade him to attend their father's funeral, even to deliver a eulogy, for her sake and that of their late mother. Junior did love their mother. When she died, he blamed his father's abuse of her and attacked him with a tire iron. Typically, this went badly. ("Once he got the tire iron away from me, my father pretty much took me apart.") As the funeral approaches, even Julia can't endure Junior's behavior: "You're a bitter, hateful man who doesn't know what to do with himself, beyond get drunk and pick fights with a world that's not interested." A young man's hatred for his abusive father, and the damage the abuse has done to his life, are of course legitimate fictional concerns. At one point, Junior tells us, "I walked around like a junkie, boiling with his poison every day of my life. I was polluted with it." That's certainly vivid, but we are told far too much about Junior's anger and guilt, page after page after page. After a time, the reader wants to cry, "Get over it!" Or "OK, but who killed him?"

In the end, there are hints that Junior may overcome his demons. There's also an unsatisfactory, tacked-on explanation for the father's death. There is some good writing in "Fresh Kills," but I would have liked it more if the father had died a natural death and Loehfelm had focused entirely on the family drama rather than setting up a murder mystery that goes nowhere. As it is, there's a certain bait-and-switch feeling to the book. The Fresh Kills landfill, by the way, is the enormous garbage dump that towers over Staten Island and serves, for Junior, as a symbol of the burial ground the island has become for all his hopes and dreams.

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Two weeks ago, reviewing Stella Rimington's "Illegal Action," I questioned the author's suggestion that in training their agents to kill, Soviet spy agencies arranged for them to fight to the death with prison inmates. It happens that I have a source deep in the murky world of intelligence who reports that in years past, but probably no longer, both the KGB and certain elite Soviet military units did in fact use convicts to teach their people the art of killing. My apologies to Dame Stella if I underestimated her grasp of the bad behavior in the world she once viewed as the head of Britain's MI5.

Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Loehfelm's dead-end, blue-collar setting...abounds in gritty detail. But his kitchen-sink melodramatics...aren't very fresh. (Grade: B-)" Entertainment Weekly

"Fresh Kills quickly expands past itself, blows away its limiting genre boundaries, and becomes a story of real psychological complexity and emotional realism." Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

"After this auspicious set-up, Fresh Kills takes a curious and unexpected turn....[T]he book turns into an exploration of Junior's festering relationship with his late namesake, an angry, abusive drunk. The result is more Great Santini than Big Sleep." Philadelphia Inquirer

"More psychological noir than crime thriller, this edgy debut won't engage narrative-driven readers but will please those willing to follow Junior into the dark places of his past." Booklist

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, Bill Loehfelm moved to New Orleans in 1997 where he's taught high school and college, managed a pizza joint and an antique shop, and tended bar in the Quarter and the Warehouse District. Bill's fondness for his adopted city is complete: "As long as New Orleans endures here, so too will I."