‘The Breaker’ brings thrills to Milwaukee
If Milwaukee has become drab and listless to you during the pandemic, turn to Nick Petrie’s “The Breaker” for a more exciting view of the city:
Stalking an assassin through the Milwaukee Public Market! An ax murderer on the loose in Riverwest!
In previous books, Whitefish Bay novelist Petrie has sent his action hero, Peter Ash, on desperate, nearly fatal adventures in Iceland, Memphis, Colorado and the Pacific northwest. But in the sixth book in this series, he keeps Ash home in Riverwest with June, his sharp reporter paramour, and lets the trouble come to him.
Petrie will launch his novel with a Zoom conversation at 7 p.m. Jan. 12,
Whitefish Bay writer Nick Petrie’s thrilling fiction has been compared to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. sponsored by Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company, Oconomowoc’s Books and Company and the Whitefish Bay Public Library.
It’s easy to see why Lee Child blurbed Petrie’s debut novel, “The Drifter.” Like Child’s Jack Reacher, Ash is a lethal loner who operates outside law enforcement but follows his own code of honor. A Marine veteran of combat in Fallujah, he has suffered from PTSD that sometimes
ONLINE EVENT
Jim Higgins will interview Nick Petrie during a live Zoom event at 7 p.m. Jan. 12, presented by Boswell Books and Books and Company. Admission is free. Register via boswellbooks.com/upcoming-events. makes him so restless he can barely sleep indoors. He crystallizes his trauma as “the static,” a mental symbiote that both drives and hampers him.
Over the course of the series, Petrie has shown Ash facing his wartime demons and accepting help gradually.
At the onset of “The Breaker,” June, Ash and Lewis, Ash’s formidable buddy with whom he has a Spenser-Hawke vibe, are sitting down outside Colectivo. Ash, who’s a wanted fugitive because of a little misunderstanding about some bodies he left in Iceland’s permafrost, wants to keep the schmooze quiet. But when they see a determined figure in a Cardinals jacket toting a weapon into the Milwaukee Public Market, they have to pursue.
Thus begins a twisty tale that includes a brilliant, angry Latina hacker with revenge in mind; a secretive tech entrepreneur with some dangerous prototypes; and Edgar, a nasty hit man who does his best work the Lizzie Borden way. Midway through, “The Breaker” turns into an outright technothriller that suggests a frightening future path of automated warfare.
Petrie creates memorable antagonists and secondary characters, including Edgar, the hacker Spark and Fran, Peter and June’s nonagenarian neighbor with a taste for fine scotch.
A former carpenter and home inspector, Petrie makes Ash attentive to the dangers and possibilities in every physical environment he enters. I’ve read a few novels in my time, but never one until now that sent an ax-wielding murderer on a rampage through the building where I worked for decades. Nick, you got everything important right. I’m putting in a requisition ASAP for an extrastrength force field around my desk in the new place.