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Death Below Zero
Nick Rezkel lost his PI license in a case that went sideways. Turned out catching the killer wasn't enough. Now he's on the Alaska Pipeline, working seven tens out in the minus 70 wind chill. Yet, there are compensations. Nick finds a new girlfriend with a quick tongue and a killer body. Life feels sweet despite his boss' threats to fire him. Then, everything gets serious. He finds a dead man, a heap of cocaine dissolving in his pooled blood. State troopers are convinced Nick stabbed the guy. Now, it's up to him to escape and clear his name
- GenresThriller
334 pages, Hardcover
First published November 11, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 27, 2021
I received a free copy from NetGalley. Working the Alaskan pipeline after losing his PI license he gets drawn into a murder in-between doing cocaine. So much cocaine. The setting was interesting, the main character, didn't like him much.
April 26, 2014
Death Below Zero by Richard Anderson is a recommended detective novel for those who don't mind the drugs and moral lassitude.
Nick Rezkel is a washed-up PI who is currently working on the pipeline in Prudhoe, Alaska in the 1970's. The construction camps "had constant cocaine with plenty more down along the pipeline. The construction camps were hard and strange places, with a lot of cash floating around and Arctic bozos going nuts in the corners." (Location 114) Nick has a smart mouth, but as the rookie on his crew he worked hard in the subzero temperatures. Then Nick manages to almost get killed, meet a girl, suspect defective materials, find a dead body, get accused of murder, get fired, and that is just the start of Nick's problems. He needs to find a way to clear his name or he's going to be the one to take the fall.
Anderson does a nice job sending Nick through several accusations, twists and turns as he's trying to save his own skin while solving the case. He also does a great job with descriptions. For example: "The North Slope stretched across a flat plain from the polar icecap eighty miles south to the Brooks Range. We were getting a dozen hours of daylight, only at that latitude the sun barely got above the horizon, shining no brighter than a full moon through the thick white haze of ice fog. Cold, dense air supported the zillions of tiny ice crystals stripped off the ground by the wind. When you looked at the sun the ice crystals blowing by glinted like sparks thrown off a huge grinder into the whiteness. The ice fog thickness cut visibility down to fifty yards. Beyond that, the ice fog merged with the ground into an obscure, impenetrable white." (Location 233)
My problem with Death Below Zero is with Nick, the main character. This is problematic in a novel written in the first person. I didn't like Nick from the start when he was all about the cocaine and being a smart alec. It just went downhill from there and I grew to like him less and less with each page. It made rating this book difficult. It's not a bad who-done-it, but my dislike of Nick made me almost hope he would fail. And... I can honestly say there wasn't one character I liked in the book.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of BearCat Press via Netgalley for review purposes
Nick Rezkel is a washed-up PI who is currently working on the pipeline in Prudhoe, Alaska in the 1970's. The construction camps "had constant cocaine with plenty more down along the pipeline. The construction camps were hard and strange places, with a lot of cash floating around and Arctic bozos going nuts in the corners." (Location 114) Nick has a smart mouth, but as the rookie on his crew he worked hard in the subzero temperatures. Then Nick manages to almost get killed, meet a girl, suspect defective materials, find a dead body, get accused of murder, get fired, and that is just the start of Nick's problems. He needs to find a way to clear his name or he's going to be the one to take the fall.
Anderson does a nice job sending Nick through several accusations, twists and turns as he's trying to save his own skin while solving the case. He also does a great job with descriptions. For example: "The North Slope stretched across a flat plain from the polar icecap eighty miles south to the Brooks Range. We were getting a dozen hours of daylight, only at that latitude the sun barely got above the horizon, shining no brighter than a full moon through the thick white haze of ice fog. Cold, dense air supported the zillions of tiny ice crystals stripped off the ground by the wind. When you looked at the sun the ice crystals blowing by glinted like sparks thrown off a huge grinder into the whiteness. The ice fog thickness cut visibility down to fifty yards. Beyond that, the ice fog merged with the ground into an obscure, impenetrable white." (Location 233)
My problem with Death Below Zero is with Nick, the main character. This is problematic in a novel written in the first person. I didn't like Nick from the start when he was all about the cocaine and being a smart alec. It just went downhill from there and I grew to like him less and less with each page. It made rating this book difficult. It's not a bad who-done-it, but my dislike of Nick made me almost hope he would fail. And... I can honestly say there wasn't one character I liked in the book.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of BearCat Press via Netgalley for review purposes
October 8, 2014
Insulating an Alaskan oil pipeline is one of the few jobs where the labourers get paid more than the bosses. But would you do it, even for fifteen hundred dollars a week?
This gritty thriller starts with a bunch of guys who have appalling cold to endure, taking cocaine in all-night parties which have started to look rather pathetic to the protagonist, slogging hard in layers of down clothing all day, fastening on pipeline insulation which isn't up to the usual standard, though nobody in charge seems to care. Nick Rezkel, a former PI, notes that 'Do Not Install' is on a memo about the batch number that he's been installing. Then the crane driver nearly crushes him with a weighty load. Another issue is the high-stakes poker games where a sweepstakes is run, while illicitly, nobody in a camp of five hundred who wants drugs goes short - and the handful of women have more male company than they can deal with easily. Not surprisingly one Prudhoe worker turns up dead in a scattering of the expensive kind of snow.
Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, Rezkel seeks evidence of his innocence and finds possible motives, such as a padded payroll list. He's sent to the police in Fairbanks, but he's not jailed - yet. Enter several well-drawn characters; those who help Rezkel and play Frisbee in the snow with him, and those who finangle property deals, sell drugs or are just unsavoury. With a somewhat unnecessary resurrection of the shooting case that got Rezkel stripped of his licence, an undercover investigative reporter and the occasional attractive, smart woman, the story gets mired in the unsavoury and shimmers with the aurora.
In Alaska, we're told, it's illegal to pass by a hitch-hiker when it's thirty degrees below, or colder. That law may have saved Rezkel's life. The experiences described bring home the reality of living and working in this vast wild territory. There's too much drawn-out poker - I skipped the many pages entirely - and too much drugs and violence in Richard Anderson's tale for me, but anyone who has liked the Dana Stabenow books and wanted to ratchet the crime up a few notches should take to this rugged read.
This gritty thriller starts with a bunch of guys who have appalling cold to endure, taking cocaine in all-night parties which have started to look rather pathetic to the protagonist, slogging hard in layers of down clothing all day, fastening on pipeline insulation which isn't up to the usual standard, though nobody in charge seems to care. Nick Rezkel, a former PI, notes that 'Do Not Install' is on a memo about the batch number that he's been installing. Then the crane driver nearly crushes him with a weighty load. Another issue is the high-stakes poker games where a sweepstakes is run, while illicitly, nobody in a camp of five hundred who wants drugs goes short - and the handful of women have more male company than they can deal with easily. Not surprisingly one Prudhoe worker turns up dead in a scattering of the expensive kind of snow.
Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, Rezkel seeks evidence of his innocence and finds possible motives, such as a padded payroll list. He's sent to the police in Fairbanks, but he's not jailed - yet. Enter several well-drawn characters; those who help Rezkel and play Frisbee in the snow with him, and those who finangle property deals, sell drugs or are just unsavoury. With a somewhat unnecessary resurrection of the shooting case that got Rezkel stripped of his licence, an undercover investigative reporter and the occasional attractive, smart woman, the story gets mired in the unsavoury and shimmers with the aurora.
In Alaska, we're told, it's illegal to pass by a hitch-hiker when it's thirty degrees below, or colder. That law may have saved Rezkel's life. The experiences described bring home the reality of living and working in this vast wild territory. There's too much drawn-out poker - I skipped the many pages entirely - and too much drugs and violence in Richard Anderson's tale for me, but anyone who has liked the Dana Stabenow books and wanted to ratchet the crime up a few notches should take to this rugged read.
May 31, 2014
The narrator, Rezkel, is a PI who lost his license and turned to work on the Alaskan Pipeline in 1976. He’s bitter over the case that lost him his PI license. When a murder happens in one of the work camps, he sticks his nose in and is arrested for that murder. They let him go for lack of evidence and he keeps poking around, trying to figure out what happened and watching the players from the previous case. If that sounds confusing, it is. The previous case is eventually explained and Rezkel tries to die more than once, following his nose and being curious. The book has very vivid descriptions of the chaos and cold on the pipeline. A quick read, it’s worth it for those descriptions. Received free copy for review.
June 8, 2014
Set in the harshness of the Alaska pipeline in the 1970s this novel PI Nick Rezkal, who lost his licence in a case that went wrong.
Now working seven tens out in the minus 70 wind chill. The pay is exorbitant and extreme individuals all about are an amusement, until the boss threatens to fire him for obscure reasons and the crane operator nearly takes off his leg, smiling with malice. Looks like the past’s gotten entangled with a brand new real estate and construction scam.
Things get worse when Nick is found standing over a body with cocaine spilling from the body.
While the storyline is predictable, the real value in the book is the descriptive nature of Anderson, particularly as he paints vivid and realistic scenes of the Alaskan setting.
Now working seven tens out in the minus 70 wind chill. The pay is exorbitant and extreme individuals all about are an amusement, until the boss threatens to fire him for obscure reasons and the crane operator nearly takes off his leg, smiling with malice. Looks like the past’s gotten entangled with a brand new real estate and construction scam.
Things get worse when Nick is found standing over a body with cocaine spilling from the body.
While the storyline is predictable, the real value in the book is the descriptive nature of Anderson, particularly as he paints vivid and realistic scenes of the Alaskan setting.
July 12, 2014
This is a phenomenal book. Set in the Seventies, at the height of the Black-Gold Rush known as the Alaskan Pipeline, this story sizzles and pops with characters and language that are unlike any writer I have ever had the pleasure to read.
I'm no stranger to the hard-boiled detective genre, ala Robert B Parker, Ed McBain, and John D MacDonald; I think I've read nearly everything they ever wrote. But this guy Anderson, and his cocaine snorting detective, Nick Rezkel? They can run with the big dogs. You think I'm kidding? Give him a shot. This shot. Because Death Below Zero is a stone-cold success.
But he seriously has to get himself a middle initial, because there are too many pretenders out there. Richard Anderson? You've gotta be kidding me.
I'm no stranger to the hard-boiled detective genre, ala Robert B Parker, Ed McBain, and John D MacDonald; I think I've read nearly everything they ever wrote. But this guy Anderson, and his cocaine snorting detective, Nick Rezkel? They can run with the big dogs. You think I'm kidding? Give him a shot. This shot. Because Death Below Zero is a stone-cold success.
But he seriously has to get himself a middle initial, because there are too many pretenders out there. Richard Anderson? You've gotta be kidding me.
February 13, 2014
The style and setting were great -- unusual and involving. But I didn't love the main character, which can be a problem in a first-person story. Also, the involvement of an old murder made it a little complex towards the end, in a non-immediate way for a reader tied up in the current murder. But for a load of hard-bitten drug snorting happy-go-lucky toilers on the pipeline in the 70ies in well-below-zero weather, this one is for you.
September 12, 2014
Review: Death Below Zero by Richard Anderson Great premise and likeable characters. Held my interest well throughout and kept me guessing. I'd highly recommend this.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews