There was a lot going on in this novel - maybe too much - but it did sort of all come together in this fun, high-stakes ride. Definitely an action-packed page turner, but with some depth of character as well.

I didn't like the main character in this one. It was a Did-not-finish for me. Writing felt very gendered, if that makes sense.

Joe, the Bouncer, is an ex-special ops solider turned strip club bouncer working for Gio, the Italian mobster. Joe, thinking he is pulling a robbery for cash, unwillingly gets tangled in a terrorist's plan to release a biological agent that could kill half of the population. Joe must rush against the clock to retrieve the vial of chemicals and contain the terrorist from striking further.

This book is as cliche as can be, but it was still entertaining. It was full of action, suspense and thrills, with most of the plot twists very predictable and expected.

I hope that Gordon is planning a series around Joe Brody because this is fresh and new in the thriller/suspense genre.

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on August 7, 2018

The Bouncer is a fun, fast-moving, light-hearted thriller. The premise is that the FBI and the NYPD are coming down hard on criminal organizations in New York because their anti-terrorism details can’t catch any actual terrorists, so going after organized crime (on the contrived theory that their money laundering and drug dealing somehow abets terrorism) is the next best thing. To get back to business as usual, mob boss Gio Caprisi offers to help the FBI catch terrorists in exchange for leaving his businesses alone. That sounds like something that could easily happen, given the uneasy history of coziness between the FBI and the Mafia.

Meanwhile, Joe Brody is working as a bouncer at one of Gio’s places. He gets involved with a robbery (ripping off some arms dealers) that goes wrong, but he manages to rescue a fellow criminal from the clutches of an attractive FBI agent. That gets him invited to help with another caper, this time stealing a sample of a new perfume from a vault. Or at least that’s what he thinks he’s stealing. That crime also goes wrong in a way that proves there is no honor among thieves.

Bouncers have a good bit of down time when the strippers aren’t on stage. Joe uses his time productively by committing crimes, evading law enforcement, and reading classic literature. Eventually, Gio has him take on some terrorists.

David Gordon writes action scenes in a cinematic style. He gives Joe the kind of personality that a criminal protagonist should have — flawed, a bit beyond concerns about society’s norms, but fundamentally decent when it counts. Other characters, particularly the FBI agent who gets under Joe’s skin, have enough personality to make them interesting.

This novel is the first in the “Joe the Bouncer” series. Fans of intelligent, action-driven crime novels will likely enjoy it. I look forward to reading the second installment.

RECOMMENDED

Synopsis/blurb.......

In David Gordon's diabolically imaginative new thriller, The Bouncer, nothing and no one is as expected--from a vial of yellow fragrance to a gangster who moonlights in women's clothes.

Joe Brody is just your average Dostoevsky-reading, Harvard-expelled strip club bouncer who has a highly classified military history and whose best friend from Catholic school happens to be head mafioso Gio Caprisi. FBI agent Donna Zamora, the best shot in her class at Quantico, is a single mother stuck at a desk manning the hotline. Their storylines intersect over a tip from a cokehead that leads to a crackdown on Gio's strip joint in Queens and Joe's arrest--just one piece of a city-wide sweep aimed at flushing out anyone who might have a lead on the various terrorists whose photos are hanging on the wall under Most Wanted. Outside the jailhouse, the Fed and the bouncer lock eyes, as Gordon launches them both headlong into a nonstop plot that goes from back-road gun show intervention to high-stakes perfume heist and manages to touch everyone from the CIA to the Flushing Triads. Beneath it all lurks a sinister criminal mastermind whose manipulations could cause chaos on a massively violent scale.

For readers who like a heavy dose of fun with their murder, this is crime fiction at its freshest, from a virtuoso of the "darkly comic, stylish literary thriller" (Associated Press).
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My take......

After a slow "uh-oh what am I in for here" start, I enjoyed this one.

Quite a bit to like - heists, robberies - I'm a fan and there's a few here. I do like the recruitment, the planning and the execution of robberies, with the inevitable mishaps, bumps and wrong turns that occur.

Another plus point - chemistry ...... fleeting connections and crossing of paths of two of the main characters - the bouncer, Joe Brody and an FBI agent, Donna Zamora. She tries to look into his background and gets red-flagged which brings her ex-husband - a CIA agent sniffing around. They encounter each other more than once during the course of this book.

Double crosses, betrayals, informers, conspiracies, gun freaks, a military past, a feisty grandmother, a Russian gymnast-cum-stripper-cum-robber-cum trusted ally, a mob type with a predilection for getting disciplined, a suspicious wife, a terrorist plot, a perfume but not perfume robbery, a falling out amongst criminals and more.

One aspect of the plot didn't quite work for me with one of the characters only seeming to add a bit of padding to the book and serving as a vehicle to get us some background information on Joe and support the element of the story that I didn't quite believe in. I kind of got bored whenever he was around, which fortunately during the latter half of the book wasn't too often.

Overall - after an iffy beginning, not too bad. I enjoyed spending time in the company of Brody and I liked the scenes with Donna. There's a second book featuring Brody - The Hard Stuff out this year which I'll read and I'm hoping she makes a reappearance.

3.5 from 5

Read - April, 2019
Published - 2018
Page count - 224
Source - Net Galley
Format - kindle

http://col2910.blogspot.com/2019/04/david-gordon-bouncer-2018.html

******GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO READ AND REVIEW THIS BOOK BY NETGALLEY***
I was intrigued by the cover and synopsis of the book. It was a good quick fun read. I love a good book about a hero who is really not very interested in being a hero.

Book is fast paced, opens right away with action, that has you laughing out loud and rolling your eyes a little. We have of a great cast of characters that we have to keep an eye one Some times you do get a little lost with all the characters involved ad lose a little sight of our main guy.

But all in all a good fun read. .

David Gordon's debut is an unexpectedly fun heist-gone-wrong story filled with plenty of action and humor. Unwittingly pulled into a job where absolutely nothing is as it seems, Joe Brody proves himself again and again as anything but your average bouncer.

Gordon's wildly entertaining writing style meshes perfectly with a main character like Brody, who rolls with the punches even as the stakes are constantly shifting. He can be calm and collected in the most dire of situations, but he can also turn his body into a lethal weapon at the flip of a switch, and it's so much fun to tag along for the ride.

Although we start out primarily from Brody's perspective, at the plot picks up, so do the point of view shifts. We flit between a variety of the colorful individuals in Gordon's eclectic cast of characters. During several of the scenes, the quick shifts in perspective were handled in an almost tongue-in-cheek sort of way that had me grinning and appreciating Gordon's unusual and specific writing style.

What didn't quite work for me was how the fast pacing only left room for rather shallow characters. I would have liked to dive deeper into the backgrounds of especially Joe Brody and Donna Zamora, and I could have done without the forced attraction between them. Nevertheless, because The Bouncer only clocks in at just over 200 pages, it's clear that this is a book that intends for its readers to get lost in the action rather than the characters, and once you embrace that, it's still a fun ride.

The Bouncer is a short, action-packed read that makes for a solid debut from David Gordon. What it lacked in character development, it certainly made up for in its zany roller coaster plot, and it certainly succeeded in putting a smile on my face!

Warm thanks to Grove Atlantic and Mysterious Press for providing me with an advance reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.

This one starts off strong. But unfortunately it couldn't keep this promising start up to the end.

Too many things happened, too many characters got involved into the story that for its part appeared overloaded with events and twists.

What I liked: humor, a fast pace.

What I didn't like: a superficial story-line, fast paced action, changing of point of view - if it was a Joe's POV at the beginning, it changed later to some indifferent general point of view that didn't do any favor to the story.

Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for an e-ARC of The Bouncer by David Gordon in exchange for an honest review. This book captured my attention in the first chapters. Joe Brody, a bouncer in a strip club owned by criminal elements, is a sympathetic sort of man who gives most people a break. His gentle nature is what endears him to the reader. What did not read well was the over-abundance of characters and plot lines: Joe's attraction to FBI agent Donna Zamora, his lifelong friendship with crime boss Gio Caprisi, the CIA, the Triads, gun running, a perfume heist, a confidential informant etc. etc. I read until the last fifty pages before I gave up, mainly because I found myself not caring what happened to our hero. A simpler plot might have been an asset for this novel. Not a bad read, but not a great one.

The synopsis of 'The Bouncer' was so enticing, and I decided to request it on NetGalley right away. This is David Gordon's debut novel which unfortunately suffered from the age-old problem that many debuts tend to suffer from - going overboard on the amount packed into the book. Here, there are too many characters, too many different plotlines and too much action, that the overall consequence is that both the story and the characters lack depth.

The characters were superficial and not a lot of information is given about who they are, and how they got to where they currently are. As a result, I found it incredibly hard to appreciate them and would've liked more background, especially on the bouncer himself and FBI agent Donna Zamora.

I am gutted that I didn't enjoy this as it sounded excellent. I do hope Gordon continues to write in this vein, and I would definitely try another of his books should he publish more of his work in the future. I feel he has all of the necessary components to create truly thrilling crime fiction so long as he tones it down a little. I did appreciate his dry wit and darkly comic tendencies which are on show throughout this novel.

Many thanks to Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press for an ARC. I was not required to post a review, and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

This book had so much happening that it was hard to really get involved and easy to get confused. I liked some of the characters and perhaps if there hadn't been SO much action, I would have liked the book better. I just couldn't connect with it.

I really enjoyed this book! It was like Jason Bourne meets The Heist!! I must admit, at first I was a tad bit skeptical about reading this book because I didn't know a book about a heist would read. From the start you are pulled into the lives of Joe (the Bouncer), Gio, and Donna!

The story starts with Joe, the secrurity or The Bouncer of a strip club (secretly owned by mob boss, Gio) getting detained by the feds (Donna) over terrorism. I know a stretch, but you MUST keep reading to learn how it will all tie together!

This book was well written with bits of humor, realism, and adventure! I could totally visualize each character in my mind and I felt a connection with Donna the most. Joe was totally a Jason Bourne type of character with flaws but charming. Gio, is a character that conflicted me the most because he was charismatic but he had a secret life that he withheld from his wife & kids that I felt he should share and let his family decide how to proceed further with the secret information!?!

All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this book! Trust me, go get this book, you will enjoy it!!

I really tried with this one. The blurb caught my interest and it looked like an exciting read. The start of the story held true to that, but it didn't take long before my interest started to wane. By about the twenty percent mark, I was setting it aside for later. I kept picking it back up and I would get a bit further into it, but it reached the point that trying again felt more like a chore and that is certainly not what any reader wants in a book. Maybe this one just wasn't for me, but try as I might, I just couldn't connect with any of the characters and there was so much going on that after a while, I wasn't even sure whether or not the story was about Bouncer Joe. It felt a bit like throwing everything you can against a wall and hoping something sticks. Unfortunately, that just didn't work for me, and I finally gave up at about the sixty percent mark. Life's too short to have to work that hard at something meant to be entertaining.

Thanks to Net Galley for a chance to read this book. This was one I could not really get into. I tried several times, and managed to get incrementally farther, but it was a chore. There seems to be the kitchen sink method of putting a plot together here, there was so much going on, and no where to really land a solid focus. I thought I would like it by the description, but it was not for me.

Thank you to Goodreads for giving me the chance to read and review, "The Bouncer"
by David Gordon. There is a lot going on in this story which lead me to feel lost at times. I like the idea of the main character. I just couldn't get into the story despite certain elements that were interesting. This may be the perfect read for someone else, it was just not for me.

There's so much going on in this short madcap crime/thriller/good guys/bad guys novel that I wasn't sure what to make of it except to say that it would likely make a very good movie. Joe, meant to be the lead character, gets diluted part way through because there are a lot of characters. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. It's a decent plot driven read.

I enjoyed this book. It was the classic good guy is a bad guy being a good guy. Joe is a bouncer in a club run by a mob boss. He was in the military. The mob boss decides to help the FBI find a terrorist, so they will leave him alone.

This was lighthearted and lots of action. I am not sure it was my cup of tea. The writing was very good and several of the scenes were well written.

Thank you for letting me read this book Net Galley

I just couldn't get into this book. It was fast faced with lots of action but the content wasn't there for me. I couldn't relate to the characters and in the end this book just wasn't working for me. Thank you for allowing me to read it and I apologize I didn't like it more.

Superb crime fiction with a unique twist. Fresh characters and plot line make this a winner. Gordon is an author to watch.