THE BULGARIAN BARTENDER

The first installment in Kulak’s new series is a thriller revolving around three female best friends and their attempt to rescue one of their own who becomes entangled with a sex trafficking ring.

Angie Hunter, Tiffany Knight, and Kaylee McDouglas have been close friends ever since childhood. Having grown up in Mount Miffsberg, the trio are still living in the town—and not exactly living the dream. Angie is a welder who moonlights teaching martial arts; Kaylee works at a sewage treatment plant, and Tiffany is a self-described “worthless stripper.” When Kaylee announces to her friends that she is engaged to a shady businessman from Bulgaria—and that she is traveling to the Balkans to meet her new fiance’s parents—Angie and Tiff know immediately that something isn’t right. After Kaylee’s text messages stop shortly after she arrives in Bulgaria, her two friends realize that she’s in danger. They don’t know where she is—or if she is even alive at all—so they travel to Bulgaria to investigate. Not knowing the language makes their mission difficult, but they befriend some locals—Og, a handsome bartender, and Dueza, a transgender woman with an intimate knowledge of the Bulgarian Mafia. They begin to piece together the tidbits of information. Kaylee’s fiance, it seems, is the head of a criminal organization that abducts women from all over the world and forces them into a life of sexual trafficking.

A healthy suspension of disbelief is needed here; the welder and her stripper friend take on and defeat, on numerous occasions, members of the Bulgarian mafia. The fight scenes, however, are well choreographed and believable, to an extent: “As soon as [Angie] had disabled his punching arm, she moved her quiet attention to his forward knee and kicked right through the tender cartilage, yielding a monstrous howl from the man. Elbow gone, knee gone. Not much he could do now except crumple to the floor. As he dropped, Angie pinched hard at the side of his neck until he fully passed out.” The humor is also a plus, making for some laugh-out-loud sequences. In one fight sequence, for example, Tiffany’s bout of explosive diarrhea helps to save the day: “Tiff couldn’t hold it any longer. She bent forward to let her colon relieve itself onto the lower half of Igor’s expensive suit.” But the real strengths here are twofold—the emotional connection and power of the three friends’ relationships and the thematic gravity of international sex trafficking. Kulak could’ve easily included gratuitous sex scenes to underscore the horrors of sexual slavery but, rightfully so, he only alludes to the brutality. The way the abductors treat women as objects, particularly American women, is terrifying enough: “We take America’s riches. The bitches are the riches.” The storyline does have minor issues, however, aside from the highly unlikely issue of two people going up against an entire crime syndicate. The overall ending concerning the three friends is a foregone conclusion—although the author does include a tantalizing twist that savvily leaves the door open for a natural sequel—and the description of Mount Miffsberg is underwhelming. The depiction of a rural American town could’ve had much a more thematic impact, but is only superficially explored.

Well-developed female leads and loads of action and adventure make this a page-turning, if slightly predictable, read.