SMOKER

Bombs, bullets, and killings galore in a third adventure for bodyguard Atticus Kodiak. After burning up a dozen pages untangling loose ends from Finder (1997), Rucka brings his brooding, sufficiently alienated noirish action hero, who drinks boutique beer and bakes his own bread, within spitting distance of his erstwhile employer, Elliott Trent. Trent, though leery of Kodiak’s lone-wolf ways, still wants him to guard Carter Dean (a.k.a. Jeremiah Pugh), a sleazy New York yuppie who’s been getting death threats from the brothers of a woman Dean refuses to marry. Kodiak, living under a cloud from botched jobs in his past, reluctantly accepts, letting Natalie, Trent’s estranged daughter and Kodiak’s current lover, lend an assist. After Natalie blows away a machine-gun—toting killer, Trent informs Kodiak that the dead man was the infamous “John Doe,” one of ten international assassins so accomplished that nobody knows who they are, what they look like, when they’re about to strike, or how to hire them. Soon enough, Kodiak learns that Carter Dean was a decoy used to lure John Doe into the open. It seems that Doe has been hired to kill the real Jeremiah Pugh, a former tobacco industry executive prepared to offer damning testimony in a lawsuit against his former company. But not even Neil Lamia, the industry’s pricey lawyer, can believe his good-ole-boy clients would sic a deluxe hit man on Pugh. Kodiak and his bodyguard buddies soon become victims themselves in an absurdist drama as they routinely question, doubt, then deny that far-fetched villainy is afoot, only to discover bombs, bullets, and worse awaiting them around the corner. Kodiak not only has to protect Pugh from further assaults but has to figure out, from among a pack of suspects (both male and female), just who John Doe really is. Tiresome, preposterous plotting in an otherwise compelling tale filled with well-drawn, believable people and nicely turned- out scenes.