Tom Piccirilli’s The Cold Spot starts with a cold-blooded killing and ends with a hot-blooded one playing out with powerful V-8 engines throbbing in the background. That’s a suitable finale because the hero, Chase, is out for revenge and was raised by his career criminal grandfather as a getaway driver.
For the first few years of his writing career, Piccirilli penned horror and supernatural books, and an occasional Western. Then he crept over into the suspense field with supernatural novels like The Midnight Road before taking a headfirst plunge with The Fever Kill. Both books performed well and allowed him to set up The Cold Spot. Though horror fans will be loath to see Piccirilli go, or even divide his attentions, suspense fans are welcoming him with open arms.
I grew up on tough-guy novels like Richard Stark’s Parker, Dan J. Marlowe’s Drake, and some of the other Gold Medal books anti-heroes but I hadn’t suspected Piccirilli had until I read this novel. The Cold Spot was an unexpected surprise, though one of my current noir writers (Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman, The Blonde, and Severance Package) heartily recommended the book.
The book starts out with Chase at sixteen years old. He’s already an accomplished getaway driver and mechanic. He routinely builds each car the gang uses at each job, lovingly restoring a 1960s or 1970s muscle car, then destroying it shortly thereafter. The message is really cool: Chase can only love for a short length of time; he can’t hang onto anything.
The only constant in Chase’s life is his grandfather, Jonah, and Chase is never sure that the old man won’t see him as a danger and kill him one day. Jonah is in no way a paternal figure, and I entered into a wary relationship with him myself. Jonah reminds me most of those old noir heroes I grew up with, older and colder. He’s what those guys would have turned out to be once they hit their sixties. And I have to admit that I was mesmerized every time Jonah was on the page because I was never sure what he would do.
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