Nikki Griffith, bookstore owner, private eye and avenger of battered women, roars into the world on a red Aprilia motorcycle in S.A. Lelchuk’s debut novel, “Save Me From Dangerous Men.” Nikki does not own a cellphone or a TV, but she does possess a wicked left jab and a crushing right hook, a Beretta subcompact, a Remington shotgun, a 20-inch spring-loaded steel baton, brass knuckles, pepper spray, a taste for Jameson and Kierkegaard and a knack for whipping up trout grenobloise and a mushroom risotto after a long day’s sleuthing. She is, in sum, what every woman would be if she had just arranged her life more sensibly and not dropped her membership in the NRA and Gold’s Gym.
Her creator, Lelchuk, is a man who has obscured his gender with initials and doesn’t include an author photo in the book. Writing in the first person as Nikki, he has created a character who peppers the patriarchy with rapid-fire volleys of backchat. He has effectively (if opportunistically) given voice to a certain kind of female — a tough girl along the lines of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, or Elizabeth Jennings in the TV series “The Americans.”
Nikki lives in West Berkeley, but we first meet her in West Oakland at a lowlife bar where she downs several shots, beats the big boys at pool and bombs off on her motorcycle to put some major hurt on a bully who’s been beating his girlfriend. Later, at an all-night diner, while recouping her strength with a “Lumberjack breakfast” (“eggs over-easy and sausage and bacon and hash browns, a short stack of pancakes, and buttered sourdough toast”), Nikki is approached by a handsome, stubble-faced guy who has just finished his dissertation on the English essayist William Hazlitt; the first tendrils of romance creep into the picture. This is Ethan, who, I’m afraid, turns out to be something of a weak sister, going all shaky on the second date after Nikki smashes in the teeth and breaks the arm of a would-be mugger.
Good looking, yes, and impressed by Nikki’s command of Hazlitt’s lesser-known works, Ethan is not our heroine’s chief concern. That arrives at the bookstore in the shape of Gregg Gunn, the jeans-and-sneaker-clad chief executive of a Silicon Valley outfit called Care4, which makes baby monitors — or, put another way, sophisticated surveillance equipment. He comes to Nikki because he believes, he says, that one of his employees is stealing the firm’s secrets and passing them to an unknown party. He wants Nikki to get to the bottom of it and hands her a $20,000 retainer.
The suspect is Karen Li. Nikki plants a GPS tracker on the woman’s red Porsche Boxster convertible and follows her to what is obviously an assignation with two dangerous-looking bruisers. Karen looks terrified. What’s going on? Nothing is made any clearer when Nikki gets a weird phone call and a few days later is warned off the case by a man who pops Lorazepam and calls himself Oliver. He shows her proof that Gunn is in the habit of secretly visiting places like Saudi Arabia, Baghdad and Moscow. This looks bad.
After a few more inexplicable incidents, Nikki approaches Karen, hears part of a sinister story, and promises to help her. Karen says that something dreadful is going down on Nov. 1, which is only days away. She will say no more now, but promises to explain all at 10 p.m. Maybe. We veteran thriller readers know very well where this sort of needless delay leads. And, indeed, when Nikki shows up that night at the little cottage off Highway 1 as directed by Karen, the woman is dead, her skull bashed in by a blunt object.
This piece of mischief occurs two-fifths of the way through the book, so the plot — an off-the-rack, clock-is-ticking model — has a long way to go, at least in pages. Nikki fills them with bouts of righteous violence, with aiding her drug-addicted brother, and with expert opinion (“People who didn’t know guns bought the Glock 17 the way people who didn’t know vodka bought Grey Goose”). We also learn of the tragedy in her past that has left her with a seething core of rage that erupts whenever men attack women.
While his book lacks plausibility and narrative grab, Lelchuk writes in clean, punchy sentences. He also has a fine gift for description: Oliver has an “uncertain face” and “could have been cast in a commercial as the guy thinking about switching from one phone company to another after his best friend tells him what he’s missing while they’re watching a baseball game.” Lelchuk gives us memorable portraits of the various ecosystems in the Bay Area, from a fitness center in Silicon Valley whose decor gives it the appearance of “a corporate kindergarten,” to a junkie’s apartment in Oakland’s Castlemont neighborhood, a celebration of squalor and filth where “a couple of chairs . . . looked like they were biodegrading right into the floor.”
As Nov. 1 draws nigh, Nikki teaches further bloody lessons to a series of bad actors, going whole hog on three and dispatching them to their eternal reward. Guns, pepper spray, hand-to-hand combat, cutting remarks and the trusty baton: Nikki is a five-tool master of mayhem. On the romantic front, however, Ethan is not entirely sure that Nikki and he are an ideal match: “I kind of feel like I’m dating Dirty Harry.” I guess we will eventually find out where this affair goes in the next installment of what is promised to be a series starring Nikki Griffith, one-woman SWAT team.
Katherine A. Powers is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and a frequent contributor to The Washington Post.
SAVE ME FROM DANGEROUS MEN
By S.A. Lelchuk
Flatiron. 326 pp. $27.99
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