Bloody Marko

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Edgar nominee Davis's ( The Murder of Frau Schutz ) psychological thriller is a powerful account of the making of a war criminal. When first met, elderly ``Bloody Marko'' Renovich is facing trial in Yugoslavia for war crimes and atrocities. Progressing backward, the novel traces Marko's life in Ecuador as an exhausted terrorist after years as a Nazi collaborator who perpetrated horrendous crimes. Still further back, we emphathize with a young Marko, hopelessly in love; finally, we are confronted with the child Marko, raised in abject poverty, whose lasting legacy of humiliation and a sense of loss shapes the criminal he becomes. With insight and sensitivity Davis takes on a difficult subject, and while the story's lack of a resolution is frustrating, this is a provocative portrait of a man profoundly influenced by his time and place. (June)

Library Journal

Now an old man, Marko Renovich is still sly enough to toy with the state prosecutor during his interrogation, insisting that he is not Bloody Marko, the infamous Serbian war criminal. Yet what may seem a game is none other than the final gambit in a lifelong struggle to become someone other than the peasant son of Svetozar Renovich, the man who brought down smallpox on his village when his goat interrupted Easter Mass. Legend says that a curse now rests on his family, and, as the defining moments of Marko's life are revealed through various women, it seems true. Davis makes Bloody Marko a compelling portrait of a war criminal not through unusual substance but through unique structure. By telling the story backwards, from death to childhood, Davis engenders this character study with the complexities of real life. It is a neat trick, and it works very, very well.-- Paul E. Hutchison, Pequea, Pa.