Just Jennifer

Point Doom by Dan Fante (Bourbon Street Books, June, 2013)

After his life as a PI, sometimes enforcer, in New York City hits rock bottom, JD Fiorella heads back to his childhood home in the Point Dume section of Malibu where his father reworked film scripts for very little credit, hating it the entire time.  Eight years after his father’s death, JD finds himself living in Point Dume with his mother, in AA, trying to put his life back together without alcohol and drugs this time.  He becomes friendly with Woody and takes a job as a used car salesman with Woody and thinks he might be able to put his life back into some semblance of order when things start to go wrong again, and in JD’s life, when things start to go wrong, they go wrong all the way.  After celebrating his first car sales, JD leaves a restaurant to find his mother’s old Honda set on fire with no idea who would have a grudge like this against him and assumes it was a random act.   JD agrees to meet Woody at his apartment to offer some advice on a movie script Woody is writing and finds Woody brutally murdered, pulling JD back into the life he thought he left in Manhattan.  JD quickly becomes a person of interest in Woody’s murder and promptly loses his job.  Just when he thinks things can’t get any worse, the investigation into Woody’s murder takes a strange a sinister turn and begins to bring things that JD thought were in his past into his present threatening any progress he has made toward a more conventional, sober life.  Dark and gritty, this a book that will be hard to put down even as it is hard to read because of the graphicness of some of the violence and the raw honesty with which JD lives his life.  While trying to reform his life, JD makes no attempts to atone for his past; he is who is and did what he did and can only try to move forward.  Disturbing and fascinating at the same time, JD is not a character who will be easily forgotten.