Specialist Cooper’s commander in Afghanistan has a plaque on his office wall that reads, “Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” It’s intended for on-duty army personnel, but Coop, a paratrooper, ends up having more occasion to live by the creed when he’s back on American soil, looking into his wife’s death. In “Fire in the Blood,” Perry O’Brien’s sure-handed and pitiless debut, Coop has a revenge-fantasy hero’s daredevilry, but it’s tempered with an everyman’s capacity for introspection.
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It’s late 2003, and Coop has been in Afghanistan for seven months when he learns that his wife, Kay, a social worker at a drug rehab clinic in the Bronx, has been hit by a car and left to die in the snow. When a bureaucratic snag delays Coop’s emergency-leave orders, he pays a colleague a thousand bucks to forge the paperwork. A secondary cost for Coop is the nagging awareness that he’s violating the first rule of the military: “Never abandon your duty station without orders.”
Coop flies to LaGuardia and checks into the first motel he sees. The next morning he attends Kay’s funeral, where he gets an eyeful of some shifty characters who will spur him to look deeper into the particulars of her death.
“Fire in the Blood”’s point of view frequently falls on the shoulders of Kosta, who smuggles heroin for the don-like Luzhim, to whom Kosta is indebted for finagling his emigration from Albania. Luzhim isn’t happy when he sees a story in the newspaper headlined “Bronx Hit-and-Run Kills Daughter of Prominent Banking Family”: he knows that Kosta was in the car when the driver, another minion, accidentally hit Kay. By a quirk of the bad luck that’s a signature of noir, 20-year-old Sean Hudson, a dealer for Kosta who is trying to get clean, was also in the car. Luzhim considers Sean a liability and wants Kosta to off him; Kosta has another idea. The reader who believes that this reflects some fundamental goodness in Kosta will be quickly disabused.
“Fire in the Blood” prominently features drugs, violence, physical injury, death and what is perhaps literature’s most winningly gruesome hiding place for a stash of dirty cash. Nevertheless, O’Brien, a part-time Mainer who served in Afghanistan as a medic, has a poet’s way with a sentence, which aligns with his craftsman’s way with storytelling. His method is to introduce key players, put them to work in the narrative, and later double back to flesh out their stories. Such is the case with Kosta, the hapless Sean and a psychiatrist who worked with Kay and, uniquely, takes Coop’s questions seriously.
Of course, the reader also gets to know Coop, who reflects back on his delinquent youth in Maine, his guilt over something that happened in Afghanistan, and what turns out to have been his troubled marriage. That “Fire in the Blood” is a hammer-and-tongs production never obscures that at heart it’s a marriage story. Along with the truth about his wife’s death, Coop is after “the last traces of Kay. Something he could take with him, some shred of coherence, before he went to the airport and gave himself up.” That’s a tall order in a novel short on mercy.
Nell Beram is a former Atlantic staff editor and coauthor of “Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies.”
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