Setting the young Nikitas far above the pop fiction crowd is his beautifully descriptive writing and carefully molded characters, including the loathsome 'Skeleton Crew' motorcycle crew, the 'baddest' set of lowlifes I've come across since Teran's Cyrus and his Left-Handed Path rampaged the desserts of 'God is a Bullet'. But if you're thinking this is sounding like 'Steel Magnolias', think again, for there's no 'chick lit' in these pages a raw and violent nightmare of irony and emotion that twists and turns to an almost believable and infinitely entertaining climax. The lives of four women collide in Nikitas' masterpiece, Lucia 'Luc' Moberg, the teen who sees her professor father murdered in an apparent botched murder, Luc's mother Blair, Tanya, the trailer trash mom-to-be running with the wrong crowd, and Greta, the hardened detective of the Rochester, New York PD with psychological baggage of her own drug around Luc's brutal coming-of-age journey. Not since this blistering debut have I read a novel as provocative as Derek Nikitas' 'Pyres', the story of a young teen launched from adolescence to adulthood in a few short winter weeks, the unwitting and unsuspecting victim caught in a web of dysfunctional families and despicable deeds. About eight years ago, an unknown author writing under the name of 'Boston Teran' scorched the pages with 'God is a Bullet', a brilliantly disturbing novel of child abduction, survival, and retribution set in southern California's feral western wastelands.

Pyres by Derek Nikitas