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Fresh Kills

Fresh KillsAuthor: Bill Loehfelm
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Category: Book

List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $0.99
as of 9/7/2010 22:01 MDT details
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New (12) Used (11) from $0.99

Seller: airportplacebooks
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars 40 reviews
Sales Rank: 474404

Format: Audiobook
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 8
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 5.8 x 5.4 x 1.6

ISBN: 0143143972
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780143143970
ASIN: 0143143972

Publication Date: August 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Also Available In:

  • Audible Audio Edition - Fresh Kills
  • Kindle Edition - Fresh Kills
  • Audio CD - Fresh Kills
  • Hardcover - Fresh Kills
  • Paperback - Fresh Kills (Berkley Prime Crime Mysteries)
  • Hardcover - Fresh Kills
  • Kindle Edition - Fresh Kills

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
"Fresh Kills quickly expands past itself, blows away its limiting genre boundaries, and becomes a story of real psychological complexity and emotional realism." --Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

In Fresh Kills, the murder of John Sanders, Sr. on a New York street corner reunites his estranged and abused children, John, Jr. and Julia. While Julia struggles to keep things together on the home front, Junior, unhinged by his father's death, searches for the killer across the bleak, haunted landscape of his Staten Island hometown. Complicating Junior's pursuit are two police detectives: one, a former childhood friend; the other, a veteran cop who might have his own reasons to wish John, Sr. dead. Junior's emotional state crumbles under the pressure coming at him from every side. Bedding his high school sweetheart doesn't exactly simplify the situation. When the opportunity for revenge presents itself, Junior must decide whether he will continue the chain of violence that has nearly destroyed his life, or give in to the possibility of a new beginning. With emotional intensity, crackling dialogue and a heartfelt sense of place and character, Fresh Kills delivers unexpected and profound insights that speak to the soul of its struggling hero, and heralds a breakthrough voice in fiction.

About the Author
Born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, Bill Loehfelm moved to New Orleans in 1997 where he's taught high school and college, managed a pizza joint and an antique shop, and tended bar in the Quarter and the Warehouse District. Bill's fondness for his adopted city is complete: "As long as New Orleans endures here, so too will I."


John Sandford on Fresh Kills
John Sandford is the author of Phantom Prey, the latest addition to the bestselling Prey series featuring Lucas Davenport. In an exclusive guest review for Amazon.com, Sandford shares his praise for Bill Loehfelm’s debut novel Fresh Kills and explains why it has the hallmarks of a great thriller.

Fresh Kills is an interesting hybrid, a well-written, fine-quality literary novel wrapped in the thriller genre. The thriller drive--a noir tone, cheap apartments, leather jackets and pistols kept in handy places--pulls the reader through a search for a killer, and an examination of how an abusive father, even after death, can reach from the past and manipulate the life of a grown son.

John Sanders' father is brutally murdered on a sidewalk on Staten Island; Sanders isn't unhappy to see him go: he has nothing good to say about the old man. But the question of what happened--how this could happen--pulls him into an examination of the murder, of his father's life, the lives of his dysfunctional family and his own life.

Unlike most thrillers, where the question is whether or not--or how--the killer will be caught, in Fresh Kills, the most pressing question is whether the execution of his father will somehow bring redemption to the blighted lives of Sanders and his sister.

Fresk Kills is a fine novel, with well-developed characters and a terrific sense of place and time; it's also, in thriller terms, a great read. --John Sandford

A Conversation with Bill Loehfelm on Fresh Kills

When did you realize you wanted to be a novelist?

Bill LoehfelmI never made a conscious decision to be a novelist. It's just something I always thought I would do. I wrote my first "novel" when I was eleven, a thirty-page handwritten manuscript that I sent to Random House. I picked them because they published Walter Farley’s "Black Stallion" series, which I was really into at that age. At least as far as writing a novel, it was never a question of if, it was a matter of when. Naiveté can get you a long way sometimes.

Did you begin by writing mystery, or have you experimented with other genres?

Fresh Kills is my second novel and my first, if you don't count that giant octopus novel, is a mystery as well. I really enjoy reading the genre, and it seems to match my writing style. I've written a number of short stories, but they're all relationship stories, no mysteries. When I was in high school, I wrote Westerns. They were awful rip-offs of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What about writing mystery appeals to you?

I love the idea of a character pursuing something, especially something that seems to be a lost cause or just out of reach. It's something we all go through, though maybe on a smaller, less dramatic scale. And having that drive inherent in a character makes it easier to come up with a plot. Mystery can deal with some weighty topics: death, loss, justice, revenge, betrayal, sin, redemption. There are endless opportunities for exploring a character. People can get into trouble for complex and sometimes noble reasons. There's no rule that says serious emotional and psychological subject matter is reserved for massive literary tomes. Look at No Country for Old Men or Gone Baby Gone. When you think about it, most every book is a mystery: What's gonna happen next?

Do you have favorite authors who've influenced your writing style?

When I write, I want the efficiency of Hemingway, the lyricism of Fitzgerald, and the humor of Twain. I'll never get there, but that's what I shoot for. Frank Miller, the graphic novelist who wrote Sin City and the Dark Knight Batman series has been a real influence on me. He really knows how to deliver a line, and to write with punch and grace at the same time. Great dark humor. Batman is probably my favorite character in American story-telling. I've been fascinated by the complexities of that character my whole life. I really like Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, and John Banville's "Benjamin Black" novels--they're proof-positive of what I said about mysteries above. The Lovely Bones is another great example. I love Alice Sebold's work. She can't write fast enough for me. Roddy Doyle's got serious game, as well. A lot of musicians have influenced me: U2, Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and the Tragically Hip to name a few. The Gin Blossoms' album New Miserable Experience is a hell of a short story collection.

What made you leave New York for New Orleans?

February. Here we get Mardi Gras, there you get slush and sleet. Seriously though, I'd fallen in love with New Orleans while visiting as a tourist. It was like meeting someone you instantly know is on your wavelength. And I wanted an adventure. I didn't want to spend my whole life within ten miles of where I grew up. Something just told me New Orleans was where I needed to be. It was right.

Is there something about New Orleans that's helped you find and develop your voice?

Time. In New Orleans, taking your time with everything, from a career to a relationship to a cup of coffee is a way of life. And no one thinks you're weird for pursuing the arts. It's a very supportive environment. This place encourages you to take chances and do things differently. Most of the people I know are accomplished musicians, writers, painters, photographers, etc. The attitude here gave me time to write and write a lot, plus the cost of living is pretty low. You don't have to live your whole life at work.

Why did you choose to return home (imaginatively speaking) to write Fresh Kills?

For the longest time, I had Junior returning home after moving away, but the story suffered. He had too few relationships, there wasn't enough interaction with other people. Eventually I realized that his not going anywhere geographically paralleled well with his not getting anywhere emotionally. Staten Island is where this story belongs.

Continue reading our Q&A with Bill Loehfelm


Product Description
Unabridged CDs • 8 CDs, 10 hours

Raw emotion, razor- sharp dialogue, dark humor, and a heartfelt sense of place and character define this noir mystery—and herald the astonishing debut of a compelling voice in contemporary fiction.



Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 40
1 2 3 4 5 6 ...8Next »



1 out of 5 stars Meh   July 12, 2010
M. Flinn
Extremely repetitious first person novel about a character who's narcissistic beyond belief. He whines and moans and rages, whines and moans and rages, whines and moans and rages about the same things over and over. It might have been amusing if that character had a trace of wit, but unfortunately he's a little stupid.

Young writers, and many older ones, should avoid first person at any cost.



4 out of 5 stars Not as good as expected...   May 17, 2010
Suspense Lover (U.S.)
Considering the fact that this book won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, I expected so much more! Maybe my disappointment comes from the fact that it was marketed as a mystery and wasn't. The entire book is based on the main character's growth after the death of his father. The book was well-written and it's not the author's fault that I didn't get what I thought I was buying. Would I read another book by this author? I would, hoping that the next will be marketed properly and will live up to my expectations.


2 out of 5 stars a still life or a landscape   January 13, 2010
Igor Dumbadze (cincinnati, ohio)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

If you live long enough, or read enough books, you will experience the poorly understood and extraordinarily complicated interpersonal relationships that define most families. Many authors have attempted to explore this unfathomable topic with varying degrees of success. Although this particular author writes well, he adds no additional insights into this complex topic; the characters are fairly straight forward, idiomatic, offer no real depth of emotions and are very predictable in their actions. The actual plot and the characters reminded me of a very nice painting of a still life or a picturesque landscape: an unimaginative representation of something that we see everyday without any challenge to make the viewer push his perceptive and observational powers to any extremes. No effort to push the boundaries; no edginess to the resolution of the character's evolution (the book actually has a happy ending!!).
This certainly was not a mystery, as the actual murder and its subsequent solution add very little to the substance of the plot; the title offers little to the essence of the book, as the fresh kills are alluded to only in passing without any real effort to add its relevance to the plot (for that matter, the book could easily been titled "Ferry"). The references to 9/11 seemed a gratuitous attempt at "using 9/11".
Igor Dumbadze




5 out of 5 stars Don't expect this to be a mystery   October 18, 2009
Neal C. Reynolds (Indianapolis, Indiana)
This is definitely a literary work. If you're looking for a mystery or crime novel, you'll be disappointed. It does start out in that vein with the murder of the main character's abusive father. However, while the son does look for his father's killer, this is mainly a story of a mistreated son's dealing with the memories of a wretched childhood at the brutal hands of his father. His reconciliation with his sister who had a better relationship with her father enters into it, and this becomes a psychological novel rather than a thriller.So if you read this understanding that it is a serious and effective work of literature, you will likely enjoy it.


1 out of 5 stars snore   August 27, 2009
Marc W. Oneal (rochester, ny)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

I read 100 pages and gave up. The character, I think, is supposed to be tough and pissy, but for me comes off as self-indulgent and whiney. There are 10 pages in which the main character complains about going to the mall. A guy that doesn't like going to the mall? . . . what a new, brilliant, captivating concept. . . snore.

Showing reviews 1-5 of 40
1 2 3 4 5 6 ...8Next »


audio book  bill loehfelm  fresh kills  mystery  staten island  
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