by Stuart Jason (Michael Avallone)
The Butcher 32
1981 Pinnacle Books
A generic guru Father Pequet goes to the hospital for a heart attack. The Butcher is sent by White Hat to protect him. He fakes injury in a car accident to access the hospital where he's involved in a couple of explosions between banging nurses.
Another agent, The Candy Man, helps him escape police questioning and joins the Butcher in finding Pequet after he's discharged from the hospital. Here we come as close as we're going to get to a plot. Pequet faked the heart attack, intending to amaze the world with his ability to recover enough to make a speech three days later. A little weak, as far as miracles go.
Pequet's theology is incredibly vague - part Hindu guru, part Billy Graham. Pequet admits that he's using the dark power of Hoodoo...
...which is vague bad-guy magic stuff. Pequet says this power will destroy the military and make him the world's master. Which is a good enough reason as any for the Butcher to murder everyone. He does, getting the Candy Man killed in the process.
This is my first reading of an Avallone Butcher, and he continues in the eccentric writing style of the original, only more repetitive and adding Avallone's trademark of having not much happen. In places it reads like Lionel Fanthorpe doing hardboiled detective, which is not a good thing. But we end up with lines like:
"Some women's home plates can be like stubbly forests, barbed wire fences, gravel pits - "
Sexy stuff, that.
Available used on Amazon for too much.
