Because the Rain

By Daniel Buckman

Book Overview

Critically acclaimed author Daniel Buckman tells with noirish lyricism the story of two men--a cop and a Vietnam vet--and the Vietnamese call girl who unites them Mike Spense has traded in his dream of becoming a writer for the hard reality of a beat cop. Donald Goetzler is a retired businessman and Vietnam vet who wants the world to remember and understand the war. These two broken men will see their dark fantasies converge through a Vietnamese prostitute, and a shattering, poetic act of retribution. Daniel Buckman's Because the Rain is a gripping crime drama, and a stirring meditation on the home-front fallout of the Vietnam War.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312427638
• ISBN13: 9780312427634
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"People don't think about veterans the way I know them to end up."

Mike Spence is a Viet Nam vet and published novelist who has quit writing, opting for employment with the Chicago PD: "I won't keep letting some dream humiliate me." He's paid too high a price for that dream and is now confronted by a city filled with entitlement, well-dressed young men in SUVs who don't have any idea of what soldiering means, Mike's world as separated as two continents, this one and Viet Nam. Yet another vet, Donald Goetzler spent his time in country policing his brothers in uniform, returning to the security of a corporate job, from which he has just retired. Donald also views everything through the prism of the war, both men's futures shaped by an exotic, brutal experience that delivered harsh lessons in loyalty, survival and the profitable ways of war. Now the US is on the cusp of another war, this time in Iraq, Viet Nam a distant memory save to those whose lives have been profoundly changed by the conflict. A murder and a photograph trigger Spence's identification with the frustrations of soldiers returned to a home country that hardly remembers the nightmare, tuned into the fine points of the murder while other cops look away, molding theories to fit the crime. In such subtle measures does the author build his story on the troubled histories of two vets, each involved, if only tangentially, with Anne, a Vietnamese woman who has assumed a particular place in each man's imagination: "Without her the cop will become junkie sick." She is the link to their past, the history that follows them like a black cloud, infecting their days and burdening their dreams while the rest of the world moves on, oblivious: "You have to realize the inevitability of things or you'll never move on." A complex tale, the intensely poetic prose creates fractured images, leaking from the protagonists' psyches, blink-quick insights that fade before the picture is complete. The author imbues his novel with an otherworldly ambiance, the wet of rain a reminder of Vietnamese jungles and endless tears, of brokenness and loss, of cynicism and despair. In the end, a haunted past leaves three people without words, the ravages of war all consuming in a blind city, remnants of Viet Nam embedded in their souls, a long-awaited vengeance surfacing like a sleek shark. Luan Gaines/ 2008.