Blood Father
A Novel
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the highly praised author of Hot Plastic, a gripping, suspenseful novel about a young woman being chased by her violent past, and the flawed father forced to come to the rescue.
It's been three years since Lydia Carson ran away from her privileged home in West Los Angeles. Just 17 years old, she's gotten involved with an older man who supplements his income with shady, mysterious activities. One afternoon Lydia finds herself guarding the back door of a house in Topanga Canyon during a shakedown. As murderous violence erupts, Lydia herself becomes a target. She escapes down a creek and through the hillsides to the shore--alone, destitute, and frightened. Her last option is John Link, her blood father, who has just come off a long prison sentence for violent crimes of his own.
Link jumps at the chance to rescue his daughter, but after several days he realizes that her situation is far more dangerous and complicated than he thought. Link is forced to return to his former wild lifestyle in order to protect his daughter, revisiting dangerous former allies and hideouts. In the process, a father and daughter begin to find each other--and the danger that might consume them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Returning to the territory he mined so well in Martini Shot and Hot Plastic, Craig pens a rollicking if formulaic tale of a father coming to terms with his past and a daughter confronting her demons as they go on the lam from a Tijuana drug cartel. After shooting her mob-boss boyfriend, Jonah, in the midst of a drug heist, Lydia Carson turns to the only person she has left to trust her Hell's Angel-with-a-heart-of-gold father, John Link. Lydia and John have been estranged more than a decade while he's been doing time for homicide. Raised by her mother and a series of grotesque stepfathers, Lydia has fallen into an ever-deepening cycle of drug abuse and delinquency. But together father and daughter dodge the cops, who want Lydia in connection with a murder she didn't commit, as well as Jonah's old gang, who want revenge for reasons unclear until the end, all the while making up for those lost years. As with Craig's previous books, this is, at heart, an exploration of what it means to be family. After John gives Lydia her first lesson on driving a motorcycle, he realizes that "all the weight of his own history... could finally have a purpose" if only he can help his daughter out of the mess she's made. It's moments like this that raise the book above its Hollywood clich plot and make it an engaging, affecting read.
