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Hardback
• Paperback
One Bad Thing
by Bill Eidson
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Reviewed by Ted Fitzgerald
In One Bad Thing, Bill Eidson makes very good use of one of suspense fiction's surefire setups, the "ordinary" guy who steps off the straight and narrow into a quicksand pit of complications and usually fatal consequences. Eidson's bedeviled protagonist is Rob McKenna, a fortyish former real-estate broker from Massachusetts' North Shore, who's been mourning his teenaged daughter's death by aimlessly sailing his aptly-named forty-footer, "The Wanderer," from port to port. In the British Virgin Islands, Rob drops off his wife and picks up a crew member: enter Tom Cain, a young man with an engaging grin and an even cuter agenda.
The rough sail home reveals Tom as not the sailor he purported to be, but as something else: a smuggler with a fortune in diamonds, which he offers to share with Rob if the latter doesn't tip off the Coast Guard. Rob succumbs to the temptation, but Tom yields to the greater enticement of greed and the violent result propels Rob across a line he never knew existed. Once in Boston, a shaken Rob wants to put everything behind him, but too many people--a mobster, a kinky and violent brother/sister pair of freebooters, an ambitious artist, a high-tech millionaire, a corrupted art dealer--are connected to Tom Cain and to the diamonds, the provenance of which is one of the largest art thefts of modern times.
One Bad Thing works in great part because Eidson takes his time developing Rob McKenna's character. Indeed, the fateful act that sets Rob's course doesn't occur until almost a hundred pages into the novel. Eidson spends almost the first third of the book on the voyage from Tortola to Boston, complementing Rob's internal musings with the physical and mental demands of sailing. By allowing the reader to view Rob taking swift, decisive and unapologetic action in response to the sea's demands, Eidson provides a measure of the man and supplies a foundation and a credibility for Rob's transition from middle-class sailor to desperate combatant. By the time a Boston mobster tells Rob "...you're a romantic, not an idiot," the transformation is not only complete, it's believable.
Eidson also never lets Rob McKenna delude himself or fob off responsibility for his actions on someone else. Instead, Rob internally accepts responsibility for his actions even as he tries to elude their consequences. This adds complexity and shadings that temper the reader's enthusiasm for Rob with the intriguing and inevitable "what if" question: What if your world was upended this way? What choices would you make?
One Bad Thing benefits from steady forward pacing, a continuous undercurrent of tension, well-realized sea scenes, even some subtle dark humor in the various scoundrels' attempts to outwit Rob and each other. The book's epilogue may lead some purists to question if it's truly a noir story, but it's dark enough and tough enough for just about anyone else, what my grand aunt used to call a "good, bloody murder story." In short, One Bad Thing is one good read.
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