Fadeaway Joe can be best described as a lean and mean noir crime thriller that puts its glowing and larger than life protagonists up front for a riveting reading experience.
Joe is a sixty-year-old man who has lived his life by the gun and now is diagnosed with an early onset Alzheimer’s. After being betrayed by the man he looked up to, Joe decides he has nothing better to do than take down his former partner and now target, Maxie Smith. He’s close too, but a chance encounter with a twenty-two-year-old Paula Jessup kindles a fire in him that he had thought long ago extinguished; the burning desire to not die. Partnering up with her, they come up with an audacious plan to stick to Maxie for their own reasons, but this mission will try them like nothing else.
Hugh Lessig masterfully divides the narrative to highlight both protagonists in vivid strokes of personalities and foundations that Lessig further builds upon as the narrative flies at a much faster pace than I had anticipated. It’s equal parts hopeful and disturbing as Lessig puts the best and worst of humanity in his characters, scripted with genuine emotions and dilemmas that nudge the readers to ask the right questions.
I was pleasantly surprised by Fadeaway Joe as a novel that not only entertained the thriller-fanatic in me but also spoke to the all-round reader who gobbles up heartfelt and grounded books with root-worthy characters to drive the story at dangerously high speeds. The icing on the cake is the criminal element that delivers some brutal fight sequences and a bloody shootout at the end. If Liam Neeson in books was ever a category, Fadeaway Joe fits the bill perfectly and in all the best ways possible.
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