5 Days to Die

Version 1.0.0

A hard-as-nails cop named Ray Crisara is in crisis mode. He has a marriage that’s on the skids, and when his car is smashed into by a big rig, killing his wife and seriously injuring his teenage daughter, he becomes obsessed with getting revenge on the drug lord who he thinks is responsible. Also, because of a brain injury he received in the same crash Ray only has five days to live, so the clock is ticking.

You’d be excused for thinking you knew where this was going. The cover has Ray looking like a dead ringer for Marv from Frank Miller’s Sin City, and that neo-noir atmosphere where it’s always night, or it’s raining, or both, is very much the visual style. But there are two wrinkles Andy Schmidt throws into the mix. The first is that Ray, due to his injury, may be hallucinating some of what’s happening. The second is that Ray has to learn something about being a better parent from this experience, and in fact his quixotic mission of vengeance may just be a kind of coping mechanism.

These are interesting ideas to put in play, but in the end I didn’t feel like enough was being done with them. The hallucination angle had horror potential that was unrealized. As for the parenting stuff, maybe I’m being cynical, but noir is nothing if not cynical and the way things wrapped up here struck me as too sentimental. Even the drug lord gets some redemption. I expected, and wanted, something a lot bleaker than that.

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