BOMB SQUAD by Mark Andrews

Goldman, obviously no longer the star of the show, just smiled at Jake and walked away. As he crossed the studio he heard a muffled gunshot in an adjoining room. And he knew that Dr. Daniel Rubenstein had been taken care of - permanently.

It was a pity, in a way. In his day, Rubenstein had been a genius, probably the world's top authority on nuclear weapons.

But nuclear experts were a dime a dozen now. These days, practically anyone could make a bomb.

It started with letter bombs: some were duds, and some were disarmed in time. Some killed and maimed. Then the church in Harlem blew sky high from a basement packed with high explosives. Then a group calling themselves the American People's Liberation Army made their demands known. And now, the working men of the NYPD's Bomb Squad, pushed to their limits by the panic gripping the city, have 24 hours to find and disarm the last bomb.

The Hell Bomb.

Author Mark Andrews mixes the best classic disaster genre tradition of specialized workplace action - the Bomb Squad! - with some classic '70s domestic strife and a heartless, unflinching perspective of the lives and limbs shattered when time runs out.

Bomb Squaddie Tom Gilbert thought things were going pretty great with his mistress Mary Jo, until she opened up a letter bomb while at her secretary job for a big Madison Avenue ad agency. Now Mary Jo is atomized, and Gilbert's in danger of cracking up - his wife almost killed their newborn baby in a benzo'd out haze, to boot! But the bombs keep coming, and then the letters too, and the Bomb Squad realize that this isn't your average crank mad bomber, no way. The APLA have got big plans for NYC, and America afterwards, and it might have something to do with that mysterious Danny Lee - Is he a student? A man about town? - who Mary Jo was catting around with while Gilbert dreamed of remarried bliss.

Danny has some friends from China. And from Congress. And some friends who know how to build a basement nuke ...

At times things get a little too loose, and Andrews jukes us around a little too much dropping threads and switching gears. Bomb Squad really has only the barest skeleton of a story per se, and every time we think we might be settling in to some traditional plotting ... well, we ain't! The mystery of the bombers' identities is resolved pretty damn quickly, for us readers anyways, and characters mostly walk into fait accompli like clockwork automatons winding down to detonation. But the dark, crackling energy of Andrews' writing holds it together.

Andrews (if that is his real name) also penned two horror novels for Leisure Books the same year of 1977:

The two fisted Paperback Warrior blog reviewed Bomb Squad a few years back, and let's just say our opinions differ:

I have a suspicion that Andrews wrote this in a particularly bad part of his life – like a child dying or a downward spiral into financial ruin. That is my hope. If not, then this guy has a hard-on for destroying people and property and channeled his maniacal depression through some sort of how-to guide masquerading as a men's action-adventure novel. Make no mistake, Bomb Squad is the nuttiest thing I've ever read. And extremely dangerous. Consider yourself warned.

I'll agree on one point though: Bomb Squad is nuttier than all hell, and reads as coming from a very dark place indeed from Andrews! This being Leisure Books, typos abound, and we don't even get any juicy back page ads.

Mark Andrews' wild and wooly writing carries Bomb Squad to a 3/4 rating. No foolin', this stuff'll kill ya!

Leisure Books, 1977