- Available in: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook
- Published: March 11, 2008
From three-time New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice — whose novels have been called “bold and ambitious” by The New York Times, “chillingly perverse” by USA Today, and “shocking, sexy… intricate” by Glamour — comes this startling psychological thriller about an Iraq War vet who seeks redemption and revenge when a fellow Marine he failed to protect during the war is brutally murdered.
John Houck became a Marine to become a hero. But his life changed when he failed to notice an explosive device that ended up maiming the captain of his Force Recon Company, a respected Marine who nearly sacrificed himself to save John’s life.
Home from Iraq, John pays a visit to his former captain, only to discover the captain has been gruesomely murdered. John pursues a strange man he sees running from the scene, but he discovers that Alex Martin is not the murderer. Alex is, in fact, the former captain’s secret male lover and the killer’s intended next victim.When it becomes clear that local law enforcement has direct connections to the murder itself, John realizes that to repay his debt of honor, he must teach Alex Martin how to protect himself, even if that means teaching Alex to kill. In the process, John confronts the painful truth about the younger brother he was unable to protect and the older sister he always felt he failed.
Blind Fall is a story of honor and integrity, of turning failure into victory. It is a stunning departure for Christopher Rice: the story of two men, one a Marine, one gay, who must unite to avenge the death of the man they both loved — one as a brother-in-arms, one as a lover — and to survive.
“‘Blind Fall’ eschews the lushness of the openly gay Rice’s earlier work for a tighter focus on all facets of darkness concealed by a closeted mentality…emotion-filled…Rice settles into a solid groove of tension and brutality…a disquieting antidote to the openness about sexuality that many are accustomed to, providing a strong theme for the advancement of the novel’s suspense elements..’Blind Fall’ not only asks John Houck, Alex Martin and others to accept their true selves, no matter how painful that process may be, but also asks the reader to always ask and to always tell, no matter how strong the urge to resist.”
— Sarah Weinman, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
“As Houck works to protect Alex Martin and unravel not only the mystery of Mike Bowers’ death, but also his brother’s suicide, the book maintains the pacing and plot twists that keep thriller readers happy, while at the same time exploring unique, fully realized characters and place. At its best, Rice’s writing evokes not the work of his famous mother, but of another Louisiana writer, mystery novelist James Lee Burke. As in Burke’s books, Rice’s characters are a product of a place and a culture that put them at constant odds with the moral choices they desperately wish to make”
— NASHVILLE SCENE
“… a powerful story of both gay and straight love that takes the reader through a maze of discoveries, soul-searching and healing..This is not a “gay” novel. It’s not an anthem for all the closeted military fighting for their country. It’s a story of loyalty, one which delves, in its suspense framework, into that mystery to outsiders — non-Marines, that is — the world where these brothers go to any length to protect a fellow soldier and never leave behind those who fall.”
–THE NEW HAVEN REGISTER
“Rice’s vision is true and his pen is strong…[Blind Fall] is a great book with strong memorable characters. More: young Rice has, once again, illustrated that he is a writer with something to say and the chops to say it well.”
–January Magazine
“Rice keeps the reader turning pages at every step of the way. He manages to combine a complex, fast-moving plot with a tale of forgiveness and redemption, in an examination of the many facets of relationships between men — whether they are loving, violent, fearful or redemptive. “Blind Fall” is a tale of the moral choices human beings make, of the personal redemption that can come when one man reaches out to pull someone else back from the abyss.”
–The Times Picayune
“Addictive from page one, “Blind Fall” will catapult readers into a dizzying freefall of anticipation that gains in momentum with each successive turn of the page.”
–Dark Scribe Magazine
“Blind Fall is a tale of heroism and cowardice, a yearning search for redemption and acceptance, and a haunting portrayal of characters, both gay and straight. Christopher Rice writes with a sharp eye and a full heart.”
–T. Jefferson Parker, author of Storm Runners and The Fallen
“The name Rice is synonymous with seamless and sensitive prose, and Christopher lives up to that name…. A timely and compelling story, with shadings and ambiguities that demonstrate Chris’s maturity as a writer.”
–Sandra Brown, author of Play Dirty and Ricochet
“Christopher Rice is a phenomenal writer, and Blind Fall is exquisite proof of that fact. He brings unforgettable characters and unrelenting suspense together in a powerful story that will stay with you long after you’ve closed the back cover. This is the thriller at its best.”
— Jan Burke, author of Kidnapped and Bloodlines
“Christopher Rice has written a high-style, high-speed thriller with a furious rhythm and pace that will satisfy his legion of fans and find him plenty of new ones.”
— Mark Childress, author of One Mississippi and Crazy in Alabama
The dog was sprawled under the rear bumper of an abandoned Opel sedan, its left leg bent at an impossible angle. There was no gore to suggest that it had been run down by the car that now concealed its forequarters, so Sergeant John Houck moved in for a closer look. Then he heard the slap of bare feet hitting pavement and looked up to see someone strangely familiar running toward him down the sidewalk. His younger brother looked just as he had when he was sixteen years old, back when he and John still lived under the same roof — bright freckles and narrow blue eyes crowding the bridge of his button nose, a thick cap of nappy red hair that moved like cake icing under even the toughest hairbrush. Dean Houck ran past the other men in John’s recon team, past Captain Mike Bowers, who was scanning the empty doorways on the other side of the street.
Only later would John come to realize that the true definition of a ghost was a hallucination so powerful it could distract you from a task of monumental importance.
Within seconds, John became oblivious to the flies swarming the dog’s carcass several yards away. He also forgot about the M-4 he held in a two-handed grip, and he no longer felt the biting snakes of sweat that slithered down his body, tracing the edges of his Kevlar vest and looking for tender spots in his groin to sink their tiny fangs into. His brother wore one of those sack dresses the boys in Iraq always wore. There was an Arabic term for them, but it was Lance Corporal Dickinson who called them “‘raqi sacks.” The men in his unit called him Panama Dick because he informed any Marine who would listen that his hometown of Panama City had the “prettiest goddamn motherfuckin’ beaches in the whole U.S. of A.” Panama Dick was walking point, as their team proceeded on foot toward a location at the town’s northern border, where they had been ordered to establish a guard station, a station that the Army wusses who controlled this area were too damn lazy and disorganized to set up themselves.
Panama Dick and Lightning Mike Bowers both seemed miles away suddenly as John Houck watched his younger brother turn into a break between buildings that held an abandoned well. His brother turned his back to him, reached up, and unwound the length of rope that held the cracked bucket to the singed metal frame that arched over the well’s mouth. Whip-fast, he let out the bucket’s rope between both hands, bending forward to watch the bucket’s progress, rising up onto the balls of his feet, which John could now see were dark brown, not the freckled, milk white shade of his dead brother’s skin.
A deep clang echoed up from the well, followed by another. The boy was swinging the bucket deliberately, playing it like a bell inside the well’s shaft. John felt a presence behind him suddenly; then he heard the familiar voice of Lightning Mike Bowers say his last name in a terse whisper. Bowers went silent for a few seconds as he assessed the scene in front of them.
“Shit!” Bowers hissed. Bowers realized how badly John had fucked up before John did.
The dog’s impossibly bent carcass positioned conspicuously with its lower half exposed…
The boy’s dark skin and tight cap of ink black hair, nothing like his younger brother’s…
The expectant look in the boy’s pale eyes when he looked back at them over one shoulder, his arms splayed over the opening of the well, rope clasped in his hands as the bell rang out its death knell…
And then the dog’s carcass vanished in a blinding flash.
The back end of the Opel sedan rose into the air on a bed of jagged white flame. At the precise second when he expected the shrapnel to tear into him, John ate dust and felt the weight of Mike Bowers come down onto him. The blast deafened him, but he could feel Bowers’s breath against his right ear, could even feel the guy’s lips moving. Mike was trying to tell him something, but it had been lost to the initial explosion. Then the weight pressing down on John got heavier.
Once Bowers was pulled off him, John still found himself unable to move and deafened by the blast. Thick black smoke blinded him. In a vague way, he knew that he had no sense of time, that he was fading in and out without losing consciousness.
Something hot flowed down the back of both of his legs. Blood? Still flowing with too much force to have come off Bowers, and Bowers had been lifted off him…who knew how long ago? He could feel a deep pounding in his chest and suddenly the smoke around him started to clear. The medevac. Another sidestep into the darkness that hovers at the edges of every reality, and then he was back, pushing himself up onto his knees, struggling to his feet.
Convinced blood was pouring down his back, he grabbed furiously at his pack, pulled it down his right arm, and hurled it to the dirt at his feet. Not blood. Water! Leaking all over the place. He tore open his pack, which had searing holes all through its skin. The torn remnants of what had once been eight water bottles tumbled to the dirt, shredded by shrapnel.
Jesus, he screamed silently. Jesus Christ. Bowers was lying on my pack, for fuck’s sake. If that’s what happened to my pack, then what the hell happened to Bowers?
Something hot and wet filled his left eye and his vision was all but blocked. A field medic raced toward him, bandage already out. The medic pressed the bandage to the left side of John’s face with one hand and forced him back down into a seated position with the other. Unable to hear his own pleas for Bowers or whatever the medic said to stave him off, he felt helpless and childlike as the medic swabbed the blood from his left eye and dressed the wound.
Then he saw the stretcher, the stretcher that carried Bowers toward the Black Hawk helicopter twenty yards away. When he rose to his feet and followed Bowers, the medic followed right beside him. John knew his own injuries weren’t serious enough to merit a trip to Balad, but the medic didn’t stop him, and that was good, because it meant no other injured needed the space. Inside the Black Hawk, it was just John, his medic, and the two medics cutting away the front of Bowers’s blood-soaked uniform, wrapping Bowers’s bloodied head in bandages.
John looked out the window, saw the other men in his team returning to the street. Some of them had fanned out in search of the triggerman, but others had stayed behind. He watched them watch the chopper take off, and he could feel the accusations in their stares.
Fifty miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. Air Force Theater Hospital occupied three dozen tents and three trailers set up on the sands of a former Iraqi Air Force base in Balad. As soon as they set down, Bowers was rushed to surgery, and the flight medic ushered John through a controlled chaos of doctors and nurses that seemed to have the professionalism and urgency of an ER at a top-flight hospital back in the States.
The doctor found two pieces of shrapnel in John’s side and dug them out in no time. Unlike the medic who allowed him on the Black Hawk, he wasn’t happy to be spending time on the kind of minor injuries that could have easily been dealt with at an aid station closer to the scene of the blast. John’s hearing was back by then, so he asked a lot of questions about Bowers, but no one saw fit to answer any of them. Then he realized that no one at Balad knew Bowers by his last name, only by the last four digits of his Social Security number, which one of the flight medics had written in Sharpie marker on the flesh of Bowers’s right arm after reading them off his dog tags.
A hefty blond nurse, probably Army by the look of her, told him patient 9260 was in surgery and would stay there for some time. A neurosurgeon had been called in — and an ophthalmologist. “An eye doctor,” she said when she saw the dazed expression on his face. Then she moved on, past the spot where a doctor and several nurses were trying in vain to resuscitate a young Iraqi boy who barely had any flesh left on his legs. Only blood hid the bones.
Not the kid who had alerted the triggerman for the IED that had almost taken them both out, but it could have been. Here in Balad, Americans and Iraqis were treated side by side; soldiers and insurgents alike received the same care. A day earlier, this lack of a division would have infuriated him. But given how badly he had fucked up that day, given that they were now trying to save Mike Bowers’s eyes because of it, harsh judgments eluded him.
Outside, he wandered the perimeter and watched Black Hawks rise into the fading light of dusk, tried to fend off some attempts at conversation from a battered PFC in a wheelchair. The kid couldn’t hide his excitement over the fact that he was leaving Iraq that night in one of the C-17 transport planes that routinely ferried the hopelessly wounded to Germany and beyond. And he had smokes, so John bummed one and pretended to listen to him talk, trying to keep his mind off the e-mail that started it all, the e-mail he read before leaving on patrol, the e-mail that had placed his little brother in the middle of Ramadi.
Mike, he thought. Make Mike the priority here. Make Mike the focus. And, of course, it was Lightning Mike Bowers’s voice he heard as he thought these words. Lightning Mike, who had reached out to John, had seen a guy hanging on the periphery, doubting their mission, and had brought him into the fold. It was Lightning Mike who had explained to him, “We fight the wars presidents tell us to fight because to do otherwise would be to turn America into a Third-World nation in which rulers are casually unseated by militaries without any genuine loyalty to the countries they are formed to protect.” It was Lightning Mike who had given John his dog-eared, underlined copy of Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfield, the novel about the Spartans’ last stand at Thermopylae. Every man in their unit had read the book at least twice. Bowers had memorized it.
In six short months John and Mike had become something close to brothers: two Marines who had gone for the elite Force Recon Company because it had once offered the toughest-of-the-tough a kind of independence, trained them to slip …
Copyright Christopher Rice