Thu 4 Jun 2015
A Review by Barry Gardner: REED STEPHENS – The Man Who Risked His Partner.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[5] Comments
REED STEPHENS – The Man Who Risked His Partner. Axbrewder & Fistoulari #2. Ballantine, trade paperback, October 1984; mass market paperback, 1986. Forge, hardcover, revised edition, 2003; Tor, paperback, 2004.
As the book opens, the main characters are recovering from the events in the first book of the series, The Man Who Shot His Brother. Ginny Fistoulari, the head of the agency, lost her left hand in an explosion, and is depressed and fearful to the point of real neurosis; Mick Axbrewder, who shot his brother while drunk, is now a recovering alcoholic with all the attendant problems. They are offered a job by an accountant, supposedly to protect him from a gang boss to whom he is in debt.
Fistoulari, reasonably enough, doesn’t want to take the job, feeling that to oppose the gang leader is insanity. For reasons of his own, Axbrewder more or less shames her into accepting it. There is a subplot involving a Chicano youth befriended by Axbrewder who has been killed who was a numbers runner for the gang boss, who is known as El Senor.
The plot is complex, as their client proves layered with deception after deception. What kind of man he really is, and why he needs their protection, change in definition almost from chapter to chapter.
These are terribly damaged pe6ple. All of them. There are no characters in the book, even those sketched most lightly, for whom it was possible for me to feel any empathy, or any emotion other than a horrified or distasteful pity. The despair is unremitting. By the end my only feelings were relief and a determination not to subject myself to more such.
It will come as no surprise to those who have read Stephen Donaldson‘s books that Reed Stephens is a pseudonym of his. Few if any authors are more adept than Donaldson at delineating pain and despair, and seemingly none more determined to explore them in all their myriad facets. More power to him, and to those who enjoy such misery. I am not among them.
The Axbrewster & Fistoulari series —
The Man Who Killed His Brother (1980)
The Man Who Risked His Partner (1984)
The Man Who Tried To Get Away (1990)
The Man Who Fought Alone (2001)
June 4th, 2015 at 11:09 pm
I read the first in this series, but I did not make the mistake of reading the second. For me, Barry’s comments are right on target. There are people who have enjoyed the series, however. I did not know there was a fourth in the series, but when it came out, it was popular enough, as I understand it, that Tor/Forge reprinted the first three.
June 5th, 2015 at 6:41 am
I agree with Barry and Steve. I tried to read the first in the series but gave up long before the end. If you want to read this total downer, have at it, but life’s too short.
June 5th, 2015 at 7:41 am
I read it and even talked with Donaldson about it (briefly) at a convention long, long ago. That being said, I remember almost nothing about it.
June 5th, 2015 at 11:17 am
Once again, I am grateful to learn about books I do not need to read.
June 5th, 2015 at 10:11 pm
Donaldson is a fine writer, and the Thomas Covenant books, at least the initial three, fine dark fantasy, but these are unremittingly grim and depressing even compared to Dan Simmons Joe Kurtz. I’m reminded a bit of Evan Hunter’s Curt Cannon save even Cannon wasn’t this much of a downer.
Donaldson’s father ran the last Lepersaurium in the US in Louisiana, maybe the exposure to the tragedy of Hansen’s Disease (his Thomas Covenant is a leper) is why he writes so darkly. He also adapted Wagner’s Ring Cycle as science fiction (hardly the first) and that was pretty grim as well.
Despite good writing these left a bad aftertaste.