Bootleg Press © 2005, 329 pages

The protagonist of Jack Priest’s thriller Gecko is fifty-five-year-old Jim Monday–a genuine estate developer and former congressman and a decorated Vietnam veteran who finds that, even after decades without practice, killing comes easy. Which is good, because Monday has a number of problems to discount with in Priest’s story, not minimum of which is that he’s being stalked by a giant, noisome, man-eating gecko. A bunch of humans are trying to kill him too, and he’s hearing voices in his head, and, to top it off, his wife wants a divorce. But all of his difficulties turn out to be related to one another, so, in theory, the entire mess could be solved very tidily…. Not that it turns out that way.

[INSET TEXT: Sure, one has to suspend one’s disbelief about the entire giant gecko thing.] While Monday is trying to solve his melange of problems and to save the life of the disembodied voice sounding in his head, he’s helped by a number of other characters: the disembodied voice itself, his wife’s twin sister, a pair of policeman who stake their careers on Monday’s innocence, and the daughter of one of the policemen. The policeman and his daughter, Hugh and Glenna Washington, in fact figure very prominently in the book, such that the story is arguably half creature feature and half rogue-cop procedural.

Priest’s book is not keep-the-lights-on scary, but he does manage

to make small moments suspenseful because, as he proves more than once, he’s not averse to killing off major characters. So it’s never safe to assume that any given character won’t die–horribly, with awesome loss of blood–in any particular scene. The book certainly held my interest. Sure, one has to suspend one’s disbelief about the entire giant gecko thing. I had no problem doing that, but I did find it hard to believe that Jim could rack up so many intense relationships with gorgeous women during the brief period coveruddy by the book. I also think that the book’s storyline could be tightened up. I wouldn’t say that the fate of the Washingtons is a loose end, for example–we know more or less what happens to them–but they exit the story surprisingly early given how important they are to it, never to be heard from again. It is surprising in particular given that the daughter is one of those gorgeous women with whom our hero so quickly forms an intense bond. A number of small scenes could probably be excised from the book as well to make it a tighter read.

Despite these complaints, I enjoyed the book. It’s a rapid read, with a quite unusual premise.

Tags: book reviews, books, geckos, Jim Priest

Original post by Debra Hamel