A tight, violent noir tale set in the streets of Rio De Janeiro, A Man From Rio owes a heavy debt to James Ellroy. With ruthlessly pared-down prose, jagged fragments, and rat-a-tat pacing, there's no denying how much author Shayne Youngblood has to have been influenced by one of the modern noir masters. But while a lot of people have tried to emulate Ellroy, not many succeed as well as Youngblood does here, delivering a nasty little noir tale of revenge, gang wars, and police corruption, all while immersing you in the violent worlds of the Rio underground. A Man From Rio never quite works as a novel; it feels closer to a series of loosely interconnected vignettes, with Youngblood drifting through his world as his muse deems fit. But the result is never really confusing so much as it is chaotic, giving the sense of a teeming crime scene that's constantly in flux and never stable. A Man From Rio is a fast read, and that's to its credit, I think; given that it never quite coheres the way it needs to, if it went much longer than it does, it would risk falling apart entirely. But as it stands, it's a nice little noir piece that's all the richer for how it takes the tropes of the genre and finds that they work just as well in an international setting as they did in 1940's LA.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
