Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, December 4, 1994                   TAG: 9412230008
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY NEIL HARVEY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`DIRTY WHITE BOYS': UNSAVORY, EXCESSIVE, ONE OF 1994'S BEST

From the very first sentence on, Stephen Hunter's "Dirty White Boys" is a shocking, tremendously unsavory story about evil people and unspeakable acts. The book contains detailed scenes of physical and verbal abuse so excessive that it can't possibly be healthy for a reader. Having said that, let me add that "Dirty White Boys" is one of the best thrillers I've read in a long time and it's also one of my favorite books of the year.

This book doesn't waste any time getting started. On page 11, Lamar Pye, an incarcerated psychotic criminal savant, realizes he's going to be murdered if he doesn't bust out of jail; by page 25, he and his gang are free men, off to terrorize civilians and hold up Denny's restaurants.

Along for the ride are Odell Pye, Lamar's hulking, retarded, deformed and passionately loyal cousin (basically: he's Lennie Smalls, strapped with an AR-15 assault rifle); Richard Peed, a cry-baby convict who got locked up for attacking his mother; and Ruta Beth Tull, a rat-faced country shrew who has to be one of the most intensely obnoxious villains I've ever come across in a book.

It's up to Bud Pewtie, state trooper par excellence, to catch up to this make-shift family of crooks and either put them in a cell or put them in a grave.

And that, more or less, is the whole of the plot.

But despite its simplicity and breakneck pace, "Dirty White Boys" doesn't skimp on character or story development. Hunter takes his time fleshing out these people and gives them a surprising amount of complexity. The heroes are all consciously subject to weaknesses of one form or another, and they aren't particularly bright, either. The bad guys, although at times less than human, are eventually sympathetic ... albeit in a perverse sort of way.

With its inverted, interwoven plot lines and authoritative sense of police procedure, this is a thriller in a class with Thomas Harris' "Red Dragon" and "Silence of the Lambs," and it also has the unapologetic gun-lust, and gunplay, of a bullet-infested John Woo movie. What Andrew Vachss did to the private eye novel with his Burke books, Stephen Hunter has done to the cops and robbers novel. That is, he's taken a genre that's almost been worn out, and he's overhauled it by throwing in equal measures of comic-book atmosphere and gritty, unflinching realism.

If you don't like books about mean people and intense situations (such as the part where a man kills a 400-pound would-be rapist with a bar of soap after almost biting off his nose) you probably need to stay away from "Dirty White Boys." But on the other hand, if you want to read a book that moves along like a high-powered, souped-up, character-driven version of the computer game "Doom," then this is the book for you. As long as you don't happen to be currently wearing a straightjacket.

Neil Harvey lives in Blacksburg.