Book Review: Felonious Monk by William Kotzwinkle

A schizophrenic plot, but an extraordinarily entertaining read.

Felonious Monk by William Kotzwinkle. Narrated by Chris Henry Coffey. Blackstone Publishing, 2021. 10 hours (approx.).

Felonious Monk by William Kotzwinkle is about Tommy Martini seeking redemption for killing a young man in a bar fight. Wait. Hold on …

Actually, it’s about Tommy on the hook for the $2 million his deceased uncle embezzled from a crooked real estate company. No, that’s not right either …

Felonious Monk is about Tommy’s love affair with a con artist who leads a cult centered on aliens “sliming” people …

Or is it about killing an unfaithful husband and burying the body? Or recovering a lost artifact? Or becoming a professional fighter? Or concrete union workers picking up side gigs disposing corpses?

In truth, Felonious Monk is about all these things. Tommy Martini, indeed, kills a man while working as a bouncer. He joins a Mexican monastery to - in part - avoid prison. He uses the time there to get a grip on his anger issues. The death of his uncle, Vittorio, calls him to a hippie town in Arizona. There, the many illicit doings of the Martini mafia family put Tommy in a number of violent predicaments.

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The book’s split personality can be frustrating at times. Just when the reader thinks he’s got the general story idea, Kotzwinkle ventures down an entirely different path leaving the reader to wonder, “What exactly is this book about?” Nearly half of it focuses on the stolen $2 million. Suddenly, a Chinese gangster kills the crooked head of the real estate company. Kotzwinkle then shifts focus to Tommy’s relationship with Cheyenne, the cult-leading con artist.

This relationship appears to be Kotzwinkle’s main story idea. Everything else, I suspect, was grafted on later.

There are other extraneous side stories, too. One is about a missing cross. Another is about a small-town church being closed down. There’s also a woman who claims to be Vittorio's mistress and demands money from Tommy. He sends her on her way. The event is never mentioned again. Had it been cut the reader never would have noticed.

One imagines Kotzwinkle’s elevator pitch for Felonious Monk was, “A bunch of interesting shit happens.”

To be fair, the shit is interesting. Tommy battles a number of would-be assassins including a shaman armed with a poisoned eagle claw. In an unrelated incident, he and Cheyenne have to dispose of a severed foot. They boil it down to the bone, then grind it to dust. The sensory descriptions are remarkably potent here: the smell of the “gelatinous” flesh being poured out of the pot, and so on.

All of this and more makes Felonious Monk an extraordinarily entertaining read. Yes, it would have been better to be focused on one story idea (the embezzled $2 million, say), but the novel succeeds anyway.

Finally, a brief word needs to be said about the narrator, Chris Henry Coffey, who reads the entire book as Christian Bale playing Batman. Surprisingly, it works! 

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