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"On duty as CIA station chief is W. Cooper, a
combination of Rambo and Machiavelli."
-- Kirkus Reviews
Not since Ian Fleming's original James Bond has there
been a hero with the grit, anger, sex appeal, and moral
compass of W. Cooper, as he's known by the other
characters in Painkiller.
Last of a breed of anti-hero, Cooper is a Cold War
reject who suffers neither fools nor the messed-up world
in which he's been forced to exist.
We find, in the course of this book, that it is only a
man like him -- this last of a breed, bereft of a place
in society -- who remains capable of standing up for
what's right in the publicity-spun, greed-ravaged,
morally defunct era in which we live.
Cooper is not his real name, and it may take a few books
in the series before anyone hears the name associated
with the life he has all but forgotten. As we meet him,
Cooper is a quasi-retired, Virgin Islands-based CIA
operative. An irascible recluse living the good life, he
has, from all appearances, long since checked out, and
now spends his days free-diving and beach-bumming along
a quarter-mile of white-sand beach in the British Virgin
Islands -- a slice of paradise he needs to help kill the
pain of an episode from his past he'd rather forget. His
life of leisure is rudely interrupted, however, when
he's tapped to help investigate a murder, the only clue
an odd-shaped tattoo on the anonymous victim's
bullet-ridden body. Though he knows better than to
return to the fold, Cooper finds himself drawn to the
plight of the strangely anonymous victim.
To get a feel for the look of the man, an excerpt is in
order:
He came down the stairs in nothing but the shorts,
baggy blue swim trunks sagging to the knee. He didn't
duck or hurry. The rain felt good. It was already
eighty, eighty-five out. Cooper stood about six-three,
and there wasn't so much a tan as a dark weathering to
him -- his skin looked like the peeling hull of an old
boat. Scar tissue creased his cheekbones, his nose had
been flattened by a couple dozen breaks, and he had the
eyes of somebody who'd checked out a few decades back.
And as to why he lives where he lives, well:
Anybody visiting the Conch Bay Beach Club didn't need
an owner's manual. Rent a mooring in the bay, consume a
savory meal beneath the palm trees, throw back some rum
punch at the bar. Bake your skin, snorkel amidst
rainbows of sea life, sleep with sand in your sheets and
wake up to the cries of goats and roosters. No roads, no
cars, two minutes of hot water in the shower and no
lights after midnight. It was these and other factors --
the fish, the sea, the beach, the rum, the women,
casinos, conch fritters, palm trees, blue sky, rain,
trade winds, hurricanes, the oppressive heat, lethargic
pace, and near-total lack of local white people -- that
had caused Cooper to adopt Conch Bay as his permanent
residence. He'd decided on a bungalow set back from the
beach, a swath of fat-leaved foliage dividing it from
the portions of the resort equipped with such amenities
as air conditioning, indoor showers, and newlyweds.
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