Overview
As a soldier in Vietnam, John Fortunato fought in the crushing darkness of the tunnels of Cu Chi, from which the Vietcong launched their deadliest operations. Back home in Elk River, Illinois, he secretly re-created those deadly tunnels. Partly a memorial, partly a kind of exorcism, they now lie hidden beneath the town's peaceful streets.
But that peace shatters when Fortunato witnesses the brutal sidewalk shooting of an innocent victim. The vicious crime is only the first assault by a man who will wage a full-scale battle to control Elk River. And on the front line is John Fortunato, whose secret tunnels will provide the battleground for his own war. As his enemy is about to learn, when this veteran warrior goes down, he's just beginning to fight.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
While walking through the streets of Elk River, Ill., Vietnam vet John Fortunato happens to photograph a shooting and flees the scene by descending into a secret tunnel. In this fast-moving thriller, Flynn The Concrete Inquisition ingeniously grafts a Vietnam combat motif onto a small-town union war. In a bizarre tribute to the harrowing experience of fighting the Vietcong in their famous tunnel strongholds, Fortunato and two other vets, upon their return home, have dug a whole system of tunnels beneath Elk River. A company town in the grip of a union strike, Elk River rapidly becomes a war zone. When Fortunato's cousin Tommy Boyle, local head of the union, is killed, suspicion falls variously on company owner Anthony Hunt, his hired thug, a police deputy and the national head of the union. Fortunato becomes Hunt's next target, along with beautiful union lawyer Jill Baxter. Unfortunately, as things spin out of control in Elk River, Flynn litters his plot with a growing pile of bodies and events. Fortunato's paranormal giftshe can see in the dark, sense danger and is visited by those he loves at the moment of their deathsare a ludicrous distraction. Not content with a climactic replay of the Vietnam war among Fortunato, his allies and an ex-Vietcong tunnel fighter imported by Hunt, Flynn throws in a flood as well. By then, however, not even that deluge can wash away the disappointing taste left by this once-promising thriller. Aug.Library Journal
John Fortunato is a Vietnam vet who has made a good life as a photographer in Elk River, Illinois. When a corporate raider unexpectedly takes over the local industry and tries to break the union, Fortunato's friend, the union president, is murdered. Strikes and scabs follow, bitterly dividing the town. Back in Vietnam, Fortunato had been a tunnel rat, one of the demented soldiers who followed Viet Cong down into their tunnel labyrinths. As his personal atonement he and two similarly afflicted friends have been secretly digging tunnels throughout Elk River. Soon a whole cast of odd characters is scuttling through the tunnels. This bizarre hodgepodge of a first novel is full of Gothic elements: mysteries, visitations from the dead, explosions and miraculous escapes, a coming-of-age story, and a love interest. The ending descends into goofiness, but as a whole this entertainment is well worth tackling. The felicitous style and great pacing make up for lapses in credibility. Libraries looking for lengthy but nontaxing reads could do worse.Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.Kirkus Reviews
Flynn's hardcover debut is an extravagant but oddly appealing blue-collar opera: amid constant touches of magic realism and in- your-face symbols, Vietnam vets join forces with union men and women to battle a corrupt industrialist.After serving a tough tour of duty in Vietnam, John Fortunato returns home to Elk River to establish himself as a photographer. Underneath this small southern Illinois town, the obsessed ex-NCO (with a little help from a few military friends) duplicates the dark tunnels in which he and fellow soldiers did battle with the Viet Cong around Cu Chi. More than two decades after the tunnels are dug, the river city becomes a house divided against itself as Anthony Tiburon Hunt, the unscrupulous owner of Pentronics Systems (the area's largest employer), precipitates a strike by his workers. Peaceable John casts his lot with labor when the local's president is gunned down following a confrontation between pickets and plant management. Although Jill Baxter (the comely Chicago lawyer imported to keep the union within the law during the work stoppage) tries to keep a lid on, the body count escalates as Hunt brings in scabs, hit men, and Vietnamese hoodlums from the West Coast. While reluctant to go to war again, John (now romantically involved with Jill) frequently takes to his subterranean labyrinth, where he gathers intelligence on the nefarious Hunt. All conflicts come to a violent resolution at the height of a mighty storm that raises the region's waterways to flood-stage as John and some of his buddies clash with Hunt's Vietnamese thugs in the tunnels under the town. John dies while ensuring Jill's escape from a watery burrow, and she makes it back to the surface to restore order in the troubled township and keep his memory ever green.
Shamelessly melodramatic entertainment, though with a crude narrative power that will make most readers keep turning the pages.