In the late 1960s, a family moves from a sleepy town in Czechoslovakia to America in search for a better life. It’s a boom period for live rock ’n’ roll, and soon they find themselves working behind the scenes as roadies at concerts. With their eyes on the prize and moral compasses all askew, they spot an opportunity to create a new kind of drug-running operation. Under the cover of the logistics of transporting bands and equipment from town to town, they build a sophisticated and highly lucrative cocaine business, eventually becoming “The Roadie Cartel,” the most important drug traffickers in the USA. Now the head of the family has been killed, and daughter Wyatt Reznek wants revenge. The only problem is she’s up to her neck in the cartel lifestyle. What can a daughter do to avenge her father? How far will she have to go?
THE ROADIE CARTEL is delivered by author Phil J. Kriz, formatted as verbatim transcripts of a video diary that Wyatt is making as a means to expose the history and methods of the cartel. It’s a simple technique that allows the retelling of her family’s story and the evolution of the cartel in a clear and straightforward manner. This is a literal blow-by-blow account of how such an enterprise could be created and grow. It is so detailed that the novel could almost double as a “how to” guide. With years of personal experience in the music business, Kriz is excellent at relaying the inner workings of the industry and is able to flesh that out into a realistic and credible alternative world where tons of cocaine could be shipping out of arenas in the same trucks as your favorite band’s tour merch and lighting rigs.
The premise of the novel is solid and well-thought-out, though Kriz is perhaps too effective in relaying the ennui felt by music industry factotums as they shuffle and stagger and lounge around in the bowels of one anonymous-looking venue after another. On the 25th anniversary of the Rolling Stones forming, Charlie Watts famously said he’d done “five years of work and 20 years of hanging around.” The same could be said for some of the characters in THE ROADIE CARTEL. The efficiency of the operation is so clearly drawn that, for the most part, the drama seems minimized. This cartel is just too slick to fail. It’s so organized that the people running it seem almost bored.
The main problem, though, is that by using the narrative technique of Wyatt recalling incidents and action from the past, any excitement and drama are muted by the fact the reader knows it’s the past. It’s over. The cartel survived that, so there’s no tension. When the action moves to the present, things begin to heat up—though Wyatt’s matter-of-fact delivery means it never really catches fire, no matter how many bullets are spent or how much blood is spilled: “I yell for everyone to move to the back lounge. The gun fire intensifies. I jump from my bunk to the floor. The bus swerves violently followed by squealing, screeching, and screaming from roadies who have taken bullets penetrating the left side of our vehicle.”
In his own career as a roadie, the author has worked with acts including Kiss, Carrie Underwood, and Guns N’ Roses, but there is very little rock ’n’ roll glamour relayed in this text. For the most part, the reader is kept firmly backstage. It seems a missed opportunity not to have added some texture to the novel by occasionally glimpsing what might have been going on in the band’s bus—rather than always staying with the roadies. Though there are one or two surprises at the end of the book and Wyatt’s personal transformation is well charted, it seems a long road to get there. A parallel story to that of the cartel might have lightened the load on what, at some 400 pages, becomes a touch repetitive.
Phil J. Kriz’s THE ROADIE CARTEL is a promising debut that blends music industry insider knowledge with the cutthroat world of cocaine trafficking. The novel’s premise is ingenious and wholly credible, though readers buying a ticket simply for rock ’n’ roll thrills may leave slightly disappointed.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader