12 Steps

by Darren R. Hawkins

Ray works night shift at a community mission on the lowest rung of the addiction treatment ladder. He's confident, efficient, good at his job -- and he doesn't even hate it a little bit. He's got the drunk-and-sober business all figured out.

When one of his clients commits suicide, it turns out that Ray was the last one to see him alive. Now the police want to talk to him. So do the lawyers, his bosses, and everyone with a finger to point, blame to apportion, and money to make. In the middle of it all is the mother of the dead young man, who just wants answers.

Answers that only Ray can give her, but the questions threaten to unravel everything he has believed about himself, his job, his place in the world, and all the myriad ways that what we do and what we come to believe define us.

12 Steps is a novel about addiction, recovery, and the ways in which we're all a little more broken then we want to believe.

278 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 13, 2010

About the author

Darren Hawkins lives in Owen County, Indiana with his wife and three sons. He purchased a B.A. in English from Indiana University so he could work in a field completely unrelated to his degree. When not writing science fiction, he divides his time between gainful employment with his alma mater as a database analyst and SQR developer and the Front Office Baseball League, where he has successfully been running his fantasy baseball team into the ground since 2002. He is disturbed by how pleasant it is to discuss himself in the third person.

Reviews

[Ksenija · Rating 5 out of 5]

About half-through the book I wondered ''Is there anything going on here at all? This guy's literally just describing typical events at a rehab facility''. Despite this fact, I enjoyed almost every word he wrote. The ending did not disappoint (left me thinking. a lot.), even though through the entire story, I kept waiting for something more massive to happen. The devil's in the details, I guess.
I can't seem to find a whole lot of info on the author, but there's no doubt that he's got a brilliant mind and vocabulary. And then some.

[Peter Coomber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dip your hand into a silk sack of adjectives and pull out a handful: miserable, exciting, bad, sad, clever, purple, mad, wonderful, gross, dangerous...

Remove the sad and the miserable, and you are left with a description of this mad, bad and dangerous to know book (maybe purple is taking things too far, unless you are inflicted by some weird colour vision defect).

This book is grim reading in the nicest possible way: meaning it doesn't have a happy moment or ending. If you are of a happy, cheerful disposition, then perhaps this book isn't for you; however if you are a bit deeper than that, then this book certainly is.

Read it: it is exciting, clever, wonderful, gross and mad, bad and dangerous to know.

[Lana]

When I first read this book, I had been working in mental health/social work settings on night shift for several years. Hawkins captured the "typical" night shift worker very well. I related to so much of what Ray said and thought, and it was the way I was trained too. I'm just thankful I never reached the point of being as jaded as Ray was. He's doing the job well, but he's losing compassion. And apparently that's a good thing? I know that so many people do this type of work out of compassion, but it's basically a defense mechanism to train the compassion right out of them and train "professional distance." As Ray figured out with the suicide boy, sometimes the counterfeit caring you're supposed to offer to people who are struggling isn't. They need more, and they push to try to get it. It breaks my heart to think that it's not okay to show humanity to people who are in need of genuine compassion from someone who understands boundaries.