Entertainment, Books - Air Force Times

Gory, grim ‘Reaper’ has giggles, too

“Beat the Reaper,” Josh Bazell’s outrageously funny novel about a hit man turned doctor, is one book the American Medical Association won’t prescribe for you.

Ignore their advice. This may be the most imaginative, albeit the most violent and profanity-laden, debuts of the new year.

Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa morphs into a hit man as a teenager when he follows his uncontrollable urge to find and kill whoever murdered his grandparents.

Many murders later, Brnwa, fed up with organized crime, has a chance to enter the Witness Protection Program. He takes it. Years later, he’s Dr. Peter Brown and working at Manhattan Catholic Hospital. Things are great until a former Mob acquaintance being treated for cancer recognizes him and gets the word out to Brnwa’s enemies.

The result is a hyper-violent account of Brnwa’s life as a hit man and what can best be described as a very ugly look at day-to-day hospital life.

If you don’t like extreme gun violence, blow-by-blow descriptions of surgical procedures performed by doped-up, angry doctors, the lack of care administered by bitter nurses, misdiagnoses and a huge dose of vulgarity, this novel is not for you.

If, however, you can take all of the above, you’ll be treated to a story that gets at the heart of one man’s immense loneliness and heartbreak. Be forewarned: One of the final scenes reaches new heights for gory.

How then, you might ask, does this novel earn its comedic stripes? Bazell, a medical resident at the University of California, brings a “Scrubs” mind-set to his story and jacks it up to an outrageous level that will never be seen on network TV.

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“Beat the Reaper”

By Josh Bazell

Little, Brown, 304 pp., $24.99