Josh Bazell serves up salty dose of the Mob, humor and medicine

Peter Brown, the narrator of Josh Bazell's ferociously funny Beat the Reaper, is a harried and scarily self-medicated intern at the (we hope) fictitious Manhattan Catholic Hospital.

Long ago, he was Pietro Brnwna, a nice little boy raised by his dignified, well-educated grandparents after his "stoned-out" mother abandoned him as a baby to run off to India.

In between, he was a stone-cold killer, a Mafia hit man nicknamed "Bearclaw." Why Bearclaw? Oh, dude, is he going to tell you — and it has nothing to do with pastry.

Not only does Peter look, as he says, "like an Easter Island sculpture of a longshoreman," he is a tough guy's tough guy. Lock him poisoned and naked in a hospital freezer with no weapons and he will arm himself — although it actually has more to do with a leg — in a scene that made me gasp out loud, "Oh no, you can't do that."

Bazell's debut novel is about what might have happened if Tony Soprano had studied martial arts, philosophy and standup comedy, then gone to medical school. Peter came to medicine by way of the Witness Protection Program; his code name, for those of us who like literary jokes, is Ishmael.

His white whale is the Locano family: father David, a Mob attorney, and his son Adam, a.k.a. Skinflick, Peter's best friend. The Locanos take teenaged Pietro in after his grandparents, who survived Auschwitz, are brutally murdered.

Bazell skillfully weaves Peter's present-day dilemma — he has mere hours to prevent an ailing mobster from blowing his cover, bringing the wrath of the Locanos down on him — with his harrowing and hilarious backstory, all of it spiked with his handy footnotes on everything from diagnosing cancer to surviving in a shark tank. The audio book version of Beat the Reaper benefits from a terrific performance by actor Robert Petkoff, who nails Peter's relentlessly profane, strangely humane voice perfectly.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.