James Boice

Meet the most hated woman in America: Jenny Sanders (also known as the country s most successful gun control advocate). On her way to New York City, to the site of yet another shooting, she encounters one of her many opponents. Their shocking collision will plunge you directly into the world of James Boice s fourth and most urgent novel. It begins with Lee Fisher, a boy raised as a patriot and native son who cannot escape the influence of his troubled father. The heir to a massive family fortune, Lee struggles to find his place in the world. By the time a stranger walks through the unlocked door of his New York City penthouse, Lee is as terrified by his own isolation as he is by the threat posed by the intruder. The stranger unarmed teenager Clayton Kabede carries with him an immigrant story as profound as the American experience itself. Refugees and militia men, Russian physicists and inner city teens, Rikers Island inmates and Second Amendment repealists, beat cops and $1000-per-hour defense attorneys James Boice delivers an unprecedented portrait of contemporary America through the prism of a single shooting."

The Shooting

The legendary 1950s-era TV show Happy Days gets reinvented as a gritty 1980s noir. Late October, 1984. Prince and Bruce are dominating FM radio. Ron and Nancy are headed back to the White House. Crockett and Tubbs are leading men everywhere to embrace pastels. And Richard Cunningham? Well, Richard Cunningham is having a really bad Sunday. First, there’s the meeting with his agent. A decade ago, the forty-something Cunningham was one of Hollywood’s hottest screenwriters. But Tinseltown is no longer interested in his artsy, introspective scripts. They want Terminator cyborgs and exploding Stay Puft Marshmallow men. If he isn’t interested in that sort of thing, his agent tells him, he’s gonna have to find new representation. Then later that same day he gets a phone call with even worse news. His best friend from childhood back in Milwaukee, back when everyone called him Richie, is dead. Arthur Fonzarelli. The Fonz. Lost control of his motorcycle while crossing a bridge and plummeted into the water below. Two days of searching and still no body, no trace of his trademark leather jacket. Richard flies back for the memorial service, only to discover that Fonzie’s death was no accident—it was murder. With the help of his old pals Ralph Malph and Potsie Weber, he sets out to catch the killer. Who it turns out to be is shocking. So is the story’s final twist. Who Killed The Fonz? imagines what happened to the characters of the legendary TV series Happy Days twenty years after the show left off. And while much has changed in the interim—goodbye drive-in movie theaters, hello VCRs—the story centers around the same timeless themes as the show: the meaning of family. The significance of friendship. The importance of community. Fast-paced and full of nostalgia, Who Killed the Fonz? is an ingenious twist on a beloved classic that proves sometimes you can go home again. TM & © 2018 CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved

Who Killed the Fonz?

It’s the thirty-fourth century and the nuclear apocalypse has come and gone. Civilization has rebuilt itself, and the results are eerily similar to the early part of the twenty-first century. But there are a few notable differences. Visa owns everything. Deer are the most common domesticated animal. And misinterpretations of preapocalyptic history run amuck (e.g., Sarah Palin established the theory of natural selection). But what hasn’t changed is the nature of good and evil. The Good and the Ghastly centers on two people linked through violence. Mobster Junior Alvarez has risen from street thug to criminal overlord. He will go to incredible lengths to get what he wants—and he desires to live however he pleases, without compromise. The intensity of his quest is matched only by that of the mother of one of Alvarez’s first victims. She has gone vigilante and is hunting down mobsters. The two are prepared to go to the ends of the earth to manifest their wills—one good, one ghastly, both ruthless. A wild satire of our own society, The Good and the Ghastly is a visceral novel informed by Boice’s unnerving sense of reality and pathology. It is also an honest, old-fashioned good-versus-evil story—with a twist of modern-day madness.

A Novel

The Good and the Ghastly

Superstar Gilbert Marcus rapes and kills a young woman in a hotel room during the off-season. That's the prologue. MVP is Marcus's life story from conception to his act of incredible violence. Raised an only child -- the son of a difficult and demanding father -- Gilbert Marcus, a basketball player with extraordinary skill, is expected to be the greatest. His life is one of both excessive privilege and immutable obligation. He becomes a monster. James Boice is a startling and exciting new voice in fiction, and MVP is his ambitious and fascinating debut.

Grayson Donald, seventeen years old, has just hanged himself from a basketball hoop next to a playground in Centreville, North Virginia (NoVA). The question is, Why? In this incisive dissection of the author's hometown, James Boice scratches its shiny suburban surface to reveal a place formed from "a cloud that slid west and met with the humidity and spent buckshot cartridges and Civil War bones clad in blue and gray to create concrete and vinyl siding and front yards laid in chunks, child care centers and video rental places." An exciting new voice in fiction, James Boice blends sharp social observations with dark humor and remarkable prose. In both passing glimpses and intimate interior monologues, we come to know Grayson's family, his fellow students, his neighbors, and many who knew him only slightly, if at all. A portrait of a town emerges that renders Grayson's suicide both devastating and inevitable. NoVA is a unique and fascinating depiction of the American suburb.

James Boice

About

Books

Join the club