'Drift' is a fast-paced page-turner

Drift

nolead begins By Jon McGoran

Forge. 384 pp. $24.99

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Bill Kent

So I'm having a blast reading this new, and, as far as I know, first cop thriller by Jon McGoran and I'm enjoying how so many ugly, machine-gun-toting, hazmat-suited bad guys lurk behind all that leafy, verdant, bucolic, hex-sign-dotted Lehigh County landscape when someone (who may or may not be a bad guy - this book is too much fun to give away spoilers) roars up in a black Saab and I say, "Wait a minute."

I happen to own and drive two black Saabs, and, believe me, if you are a moderately nefarious ne'er-do-well, you don't want to wrap yourself in a Saab. In just about every movie, TV and literary thriller I've encountered (a recent exception is the terrific film Premium Rush), bad-guy vehicles are symbols of excess piloted by snarky sociopaths who aspire to be too rich, too powerful, and too important. You can argue about the mental state of a typical Saab owner (we do this all the time, especially when we're waiting for parts), but, for street swagger, go somewhere else.

And McGoran does, in several deft car chases along those twisty, scenic, shoulderless two-lane Lehigh County roads. He also has a few nicely choreographed shootouts, billowing explosions, a duel with a crop duster, some reasonably plausible martial arts moves, and, just to keep our cop hero motivated, a damsel in deep distress.

We meet McGoran's fictional Philadelphia Narcotics Detective Doyle Carrick on a mean street somewhere in "North Philly" doing backup surveillance on an undercover drug buy. Carrick is what the cops I know call a "hot dog." He's very good at what he does, but he has such a short fuse that he can't help taking action, if not the law, into his own hands, causing more trouble than the job of policing requires.

McGoran makes us sympathetic to Carrick by pointing out that some of his "anger management issues" are rooted in family stress. When he hears his mother has just died of cancer in a Lehigh County hospital, he loses his patience with waffling drug dealers.

Faster than you can say, "slam-bang," Carrick is yanked off the street and put on three-week suspension. Within a few days, his stepfather passes on. Because Carrick is conveniently unmarried, he has nothing to do but head up Route 78 to put his deceased parents' affairs in order.

Their house is on a small spread outside a fictional, xenophobic Lehigh Valley hamlet where housing developers are buying up anything that doesn't move. On the outskirts, Carrick observes what appears to be the burned-out remains of a house used to make meth (Breaking Bad fans know too much about this). At the town's center is a restaurant where everybody knows everybody else but nobody wants to know Carrick, especially the ugly, obnoxious, small-town punk who is menacing the young, athletically trim woman dining alone. Another slam (but not a bang) and Carrick is driving to his parents' place when he's run off the road and given a ticket by a shifty local police chief.

Turns out the woman Carrick defended from the menacing punk is Nola Watkins, who owns a soon-to-be-certified organic micro-farm next door to Carrick's parents' house. Watkins' current crop is blue heirloom corn to match the color of a bride's wedding dress, but an organic lifestyle for her means much more. Because she suffers from an acute sensitivity to many of the chemicals in house cleaners and processed foods, her entire life depends on living, and making a living in, a reasonably chemical-free environment.

Before Carrick and Watkins can become passionately acquainted, something yucky happens to her corn crop that could have something to do with a strange, vaguely industrial compound at the edge of her farm that is conveniently hidden behind a wall of trees that have grown much too fast to be merely organic. Could the source of Watkins' crop failure have something to do with "drift," the tendency of genetically altered plants to cross-pollinate with more vulnerable organic heirlooms?

Because Carrick is such a hot dog, he can't help bugging his cop buddies back in Philadelphia with license plate numbers and photos of nasty local types who look too much like bad guys Carrick sent to prison.

McGoran, who is now editor in chief of Grid Magazine, was also for many years communications director for Philadelphia's historic Weaver's Way Co-op grocery store, and he posits that unscrupulous types (some of whom may drive Saabs - you never know), could take "Frankenfood" to a new low and - to intend a pun you won't appreciate until you read the book - high. As you may expect, the losers in this scheme aren't just earnest farmers who could be in the drift, but also retirees (like Carrick's parents) looking for a quiet life; small-town creeps; a gloating thug with a Slavic name; a rapacious real estate developer; a saucy female lawyer; a brewer of bootleg hooch; predatory college professors; people who like libraries (me!); and - best of all - monarch butterflies, whose migration McGoran notes in a great scene at the top of Hawk Mountain. Car chases lead to escalating, quickly paced ultraviolence in which Carrick dispatches a few too many bad guys with the kind of blithe, unemotional nonchalance we would normally associate with sociopaths who drive, well, anything but a Saab.

This said, the book is great fun to read. The few police procedures employed are believable and, for all the finger-pointing about Frankenfood, McGoran is careful to note that it isn't the technology that is dangerous so much as those who would use it for venal ends. After a few starts and stops at the beginning, Drift revs up to become an entertaining page-turner that thriller readers (myself among them) will savor. McGoran has made his bones in the thriller trade.