Book Review: Beware the Hawk

Happy Monday, friends!

I am super psyched to introduce this review to you!  It is the first of what I hope will many reviews of books published by my colleagues in the Fairfield MFA program.

Get It on Kindle

AJ O’Connell graduated from our program last summer and has recently had her novelette (what a great word!), Beware the Hawk, published on Amazon.  (It’s about 40 pages long.)  It’s available for Kindles only–just another reason to get one, folks.  If I may digress for a moment, I’ve finally started reading like mad on my Kindle Fire.  Before I was using it mainly to watch TV shows on my commute home from work. But since discovering my library system’s e-book site last weekend, I’m reading my fourth e-book (yes, I embrace the craziness that is my psychotic reading habit).  So, get a Kindle, and you can enjoy AJ’s awesome book.

Pulp Fiction Awesomeness

Beware the Hawk is short but definitely not sweet–it’s a sort of pulp fiction / hard-boiled detective story, narrated by an unnamed, tough-talking woman who’s getting paid more then $50 grand a year just out of college to act as a courier for packages from New York, usually to Boston.  She’s never asked too many questions before, perhaps afraid she won’t like what she finds out, but it’s pretty safe to awesome the “organization” she works for is up to no good.  They’ve never done anything to make her afraid–but this trip is different.  For starters, when she stumbles off the Chinatown bus in the middle of the night, she slips on the ice and sprains her ankle.

The trip goes from bad to worse.  She meets her contact in a local bar (which has an opium den in the back, to which he occasionally disappears).  Since she’s met Leo before, she refuses to say the safe word–”The dove is fat, content, and peaceful,” to which Leo is to respond, “Beware the hawk”–and he almost gets her kicked out of the bar.  Once they’re on the same page, he gives her instructions for their meet the following day.

But the pickup goes bad, and soon our heroine, after accepting a date with a guy she’s seen around a few times, is being chased through Beantown, still limping.  The climax is satisfying and dramatic, but it’s the surprise ending–which kept me guessing to the final words–that makes this story incredibly fun.

AJ’s writing is stellar: the prose is crisp and tight, the characters well drawn, the setting atmospheric, the plot exciting.  But, having workshopped with her last winter, I knew that already.

So check it out, folks.  For $2.99 (that’s less than a latte), you’ve got an afternoon of fun on your hands.  And stay tuned for an author interview on Thursday.

Beware the hawk.