Cruisers

A highway patrolman, a computer repairman, their girlfriends (one from Russia) and some strange side characters all contemplating their every sensation and thought in great detail. The fog gets pretty thick at times and within it a few people are killed, some are terrified and some love weaves though it, both beautiful and sick. I would not have thought I would like such a book, but at the end, it left me with such strong feelings that I had to say it was pretty good - at least a 3.5. It is not so much a mystery, nor a thriller, as it is just a psychological study through which, if we hang in there, we may learn a few things about ourselves

A murdered woman lying by the side of the road, her breasts mutilated; a pregnant Russian mail order bride; a strangely conceived foxhunt; and a black snake - a metaphor for all that is evil - slithering through the rafters of a country cabin. With an almost symphonic force, author Craig Nova brings these seemingly disparate elements together to create a story that is infused with drama, love and tells an evocative tale of loneliness and the isolation of life. The characters in Cruisers are desperate and fraught, trapped in emotional cages of their own making; they're ready to snap, endlessly driven by anger, desperation, and colossal family conflict. Told in alternating chapters and set in Southern Vermont, Cruisers is a portrait of two men, each battling with his own conflicted soul. Both become the prey and the predator, and together they are irrevocably set upon a collision course with one another. Russell Boyd is a Vermont state trooper having doubts about the risks his night-shift job entails. Every night as he traverses the highways and tickets speeders, he wonders whether there are other possibly more serious offenders out there. Falling into the arms of Zofia, his lover, Russell seeks solace from the rigors of the job. But Zofia, a responsible schoolteacher, knows the inherent dangers of Russell's job and hesitates to make a binding pledge to him. When Zofia becomes pregnant and considers an abortion, Russell is left with a sense of a collision between common sense and his beliefs about what he should do. He tries to decide just what it was he needs to hang on to - was it his grandfathers love or the certainty of what things are like when they go wrong? Plagued by the ineffectual, and haunted by Zofia's worries, Russell feels powerless to stop the tawdry senselessness of his job, which seems to exist in the memory of colours and the half-frozen landscape. Life has left Russell restless and fatigued so he permanently hangs between the two. Frank Kohler, a thirty-year-old computer repairman, lives alone in the Vermont woods and patrols his property with a fanaticism that borders on the dangerous. Frank is struggling with a "deep and nameless turmoil" and is driven by the angry memories of his murdered mother. In desperation, he decides that love will save him, but since he's too publicly clumsy to court a woman, he orders a mail-order bride from Russia. Frank constantly lives on the edge and the only reason he has been able to survive is by being careful about what he had led himself to remember. Frank's sense of fragility, which he detested and his closeness to that abyss of sparkling light, steadily becomes worse. Racked with life's claustrophobia, Frank's emotional solace though love is futile, because the dye has already been cast. It is though everything about the world that he couldn't get control of had been there when he found his mother murdered. His new-fangled flashy black sports car and his new Russian bride have unfortu

I am an avid reader during the summer months and came across this book while perusing the book shelves at my favorite bookstore. Well! Reading this novel was a brand new experience! The story is gripping, the characters are "real", and my soul just "resonated" to the "words"....the duality of our humaness and lives, the dark and the light, the mundane and the violence, the confusion and the clarity. Never have I read anything like this before. I am a new Craig Nova fan.

Cruisers can refer both to the car driven by State Trouper Russell Boyd or the two men who cruise thorough this dark novel, Boyd and a wacked out computer techie named Frank Kohler. Boyd cruises Vermont's highways during the night, chasing down speeders and lawbreakers. He loves his job, but broods about the dangers, knowing that anything can happen when he stops someone. He lives with school teacher Zofia Wira who worries throughout the night about whether or not he'll come home safe and sound. Only when he does, can she relax and start her day. Kohler is a lonely, damaged and slightly deranged soul who saw his prostitute mother murdered when he was a child. It's a memory that haunts him. How could it not? Like the Beatle's song, he believes all he needs is love and he searches for it with a Russian mail order bride, who is not exactly what he expected. Katryna Kolymov, the bride, has her own agenda, one very different from Frank's, and in the end it pushes him beyond where any sane man would ever go and being that Frank is a man drawn to black, to the dark, when he's pushed, violence is the result. The book alternates between Russ and Frank's stories, crossing paths just three times, the first when Russ and Zofia accidently trespass on Frank's land when they are fishing, from that point on, we sense that something bad, something very bad is going to happen, and it's impossible to stop reading. This is a dark book, beautifully written by a masterful storyteller. The characters stay with you long after you've turned the last page, intruding into your night, hanging around throughout the day.