Death Wish

By Brian Garfield

In the wake of a chilling attack, an ordinary man decides to take revenge.

When his wife and daughter are attacked in their home, Paul Benjamin is enjoying a three-martini lunch. A professional man, soft around the middle, Paul lives happily isolated from the rougher side of New York City. As he nurses his gin headache, a call comes from his son-in-law asking him to come to the hospital. In a few hours, his world will collapse around him.

As Paul slurped down his lunchtime gin, drug addicts broke into his cozy Upper West Side apartment. For a handful of money, they savagely beat Paul's wife and daughter, leaving his wife dead and his daughter comatose. After his shock wears off, and Paul realizes the police department is helpless, his thoughts turn to revenge -- not just for him, but for every decent family broken by the dark forces of society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784084509

Brian Garfield

The author of more than seventy books, Brian Garfield (1939–2018) is one of the country’s most prolific writers of thrillers, westerns, and other genre fiction. Raised in Arizona, Garfield found success at an early age, publishing his first novel when he was only eighteen. After time in the army, a few years touring with a jazz band, and earning an MA from the University of Arizona, he settled into writing full-time.   Garfield served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and the Western Writers of America, the only author to have held both offices. Nineteen of his novels have been made into films, including Death Wish (1972), The Last Hard Men (1976), and Hopscotch (1975), for which he wrote the screenplay. To date, his novels have sold over twenty million copies worldwide.

Reviews for Death Wish

[encephalical · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Writing is poor, full of telling instead of showing, non-sequiturs, bad dialogue, casual racism and misogyny. The chief introspection literally comes when Paul reads an interview of a forensic psychologist while hogging the John at a party. There's no suspense. I will say the ending is more chilling than the Bronson film.

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well-known novel (made into a movie) about a conventional liberal lawyer whose wife is killed and daughter becomes mentally disabled after being beaten by muggers He eventually buys a pistol and begins shooting minor street criminals; at the end of the book, despite a close call, he is still doing it. The novel is told from his viewpoint (though not first person), so his motives are sympathetically explored, but it is not clear whether the writer intends the reader to agree with his decision.

[bensdad00 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Much like First Blood (Rambo) released in the same year, the book has been overshadowed by the subsequent movie franchise. And much like First Blood, the literary version of the carachter is more nuanced , fragile and interesting.

[smichaelwilson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"There are times I’m convinced there’s nothing more to existence in this world than a black desert where blind people pick up rocks and grope around to kill one another.”There's a reason why Garfield's novel of vigilante justice resonated so well with both the reading a film-going population of the seventies. The economic and sociopolitical struggles of that decade was woven deep into the very cultural existence at the time. Death Wish - with its lingering look at the emotional deterioration of the survivor of inner-city gang violence that eventually leads to violent assaults in a desperate attempt to achieve some sort of societal (if not cosmic) justice - managed to appeal not only to a segment of the population that wished to retaliate against increasing crime and disharmony with bloody retribution, but also to those who feared this kind of romanticized barbarism. Garfield achieves this dual status by allowing the reader to remain empathetic to the plight of Paul Benjamin after his wife and daughter are attacked (and the wife killed) by drug addicted street thugs, but doesn't manufacture exterior excuses or rationalizations for his increasingly misanthropic worldview and behavior, enabling one to understand without condoning, or conversely, to cheer on Benjamin without losing sight of the disconnect with humanity caused by his actions. In other hands, Death Wish would be just another men's adventure novel (exactly what the film franchise became, ironically), but instead it is a journey into the depths of human desperation, obsession, and ultimately, personal retribution.