Contemporary Authors

• The Driver ( novel) Dutton (New York, NY), 2017

1. The driver : a novel LCCN 2016038929 Type of material Book Personal name Hanson, Hart, author. Main title The driver : a novel / Hart Hanson. Published/Produced New York, New York : Dutton, [2017] Description 327 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781101986363 (hardback) 9781101986370 (trade paperback) CALL NUMBER PS3608.A72275 D75 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Penguin Random House - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2012718/hart-hanson

  Hart Hanson
  Photo of Hart Hanson
  Photo: © Brigitte Hanson

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  Hart Hanson created the FOX television series Bones, the longest-running scripted hour-long series in FOX history, now in its eleventh season. Prior to Bones, Hanson was executive producer of the Emmy-nominated CBS TV series Judging Amy, followed by Joan of Arcadia, for which he won the Humanitas Prize, a People’s Choice Award, and the AFI Program of the Year Award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Venice, California.

• IMDb - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0361274/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

  Hart Hanson
  Biography
  Showing all 7 items
  Jump to: Overview (2) | Mini Bio (1) | Trivia (1) | Personal Quotes (3)
  Overview (2)
  Born July 26, 1957 in Burlingame, California, USA
  Birth Name Hartwick David Hanson
  Mini Bio (1)
  Hart Hanson was born on July 26, 1957 in Burlingame, California, USA as Hartwick David Hanson. He is a writer and producer, known for Traders (1996), Bones (2005) and Backstrom (2015).
  Trivia (1)
  Raised in Canada. Holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.
  Personal Quotes (3)
  [on why there will only be a limited number of episodes on 'Bones' The dead bodies.) There are a lot of elements in our show that have to be perfect, and dead bodies are one. A big one. The dead bodies have to be made. That's a real skill.
  If our cases are highly compressed, we compensate in our relationship arcs. We may catch a murderer in forty-four minutes, but it took us six years to have Booth and Brennan consummate their love.
  [on Detective Lt. Everett Backstrom in the 'Backstrom' series] He's awful. He's just awful. In the books, Backstrom has no redeeming values. He's not even a very good detective. He just takes credit for what other people do, like a showrunner. The one change we made for network TV was to make him very good at his job and take all those bad qualities that he has in the book and turn them into a tool for solving crimes. We hope viewers will watch long enough to realize that what he's saying does not come for a 'bad human being' place. It comes from a bad place in a human being.

• The Big Thrill - http://www.thebigthrill.org/2017/07/the-driver-by-hart-hanson/

  CRIME FICTION, LATEST BOOKS
  The Driver by Hart Hanson
  JULY 31, 2017 by ITW 0
  Michael Skellig is a limo driver waiting for his client in the alley behind an upscale hotel. He’s spent the past twenty-eight hours ferrying around Bismarck Avila, a celebrity skateboard mogul who isn’t going home any time soon. Suddenly the wind begins to speak to Skellig in the guttural accent of the Chechen torturer he shot through the eye in Yemen a decade ago: Troubletroubletrouble. Skellig has heard these warnings before—he’s an Army Special Forces sergeant whose limo company is staffed by a ragtag band of wounded veterans, including his Afghan interpreter—and he knows to listen carefully.

  Skellig runs inside just in time to save Avila from two gunmen but too late for one of Avila’s bodyguards—and wakes up hours later in the hospital, the only person of interest in custody for the murder. As for Avila? He’s willing to help clear Skellig’s name under one peculiar condition: that Skellig become Avila’s personal chauffeur. A cushy gig for any driver, except for the fact that someone is clearly trying to kill Avila, and Skellig is literally the only person sitting between Avila and a bullet to the head.

  The Big Thrill recently caught up with Hart Hanson to discuss his new release, THE DRIVER:

  What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

  I hope people will take away the notions that LA is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, if you know where to look; that you shouldn’t trust your GPS if you really want to know where you are going; and, most importantly, the irrefutable fact that our veterans deserve immeasurable gratitude and we must do better by them.

  Was there anything new you discovered, or surprised you, as you wrote this book?

  Having been a TV scriptwriter for years, I’d always had the support of producers, actors, directors, costume designers, production designers, cinematographers, casting directors, special effects supervisors, sound designers, stunt people, choreographers, composers … and a hundred and twenty others. Writing a book by myself, I was required to take on all those jobs, down to describing shoes. Shocking.

  What authors or books have influenced your career as a writer, and why?

  As a kid, I fell in love with book series like “The Famous Five” by Enid Blyton, and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Then it was E.M. Forster’s Hornblower, George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, Bernard Cornwell’s Sharp, LeCarre’s Smiley, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin seafaring adventures, Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and Tony Hillerman’s Navajo novels—all these instilled my own deep desire to create a distinct fictional world populated by characters with whom I’d like to spend all my time.

  *****

  Hart Hanson wrote for Canadian television before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked on various TV programs before creating the series Bones, the longest-running scripted hour-long series on the FOX network. Married with two sons, Hart lives with his wife, Brigitte, in Venice, California. The Driver is his first novel.

  Photo credit: Brigitte Hanson

• Tethered By Letters - https://tetheredbyletters.com/an-interview-with-hart-hanson/

  An Interview with Hart Hanson
  by Dani Hedlund

  Let me start with the most cliché of questions: What inspired you to write a book like this?

  I started out intending to be a writer of fiction, but my girlfriend—who is now my wife—got pregnant when I was in grad school. She was the breadwinner then, a graphic designer, and I thought to myself that I better pull my weight. I hoped I could sell a couple of TV scripts because I’d heard you could get ten grand for a half-hour script. So I figured if I could sell two or three of those a year, I could be a responsible father.

  It didn’t turn out that way. Once you stick your toe into TV you just get pulled in. So here I was, almost thirty years later, thinking, I’m going to write a book. I was on an overall deal at 20th Century Fox to do TV. I’ve done this show called Bones, which did pretty well and made it so that I had options. The option I decided to take was to quit writing television for a year and write a book.

  All of your characters have very distinct voices. For example, Lucky, the Afghani translator, speaks as if he is capitalizing random words when he talks. How did you create such unique voices for each character?

  That’s some TV training again. Early in my television career I found out that you have to sit down with an actor and really discuss the character. If you don’t fill in the character’s voice, then the actor will. It’s part of the writer’s job to do that. They are making an audio book for The Driver, and they called to ask how to do a number of things with people’s voices. For Lucky, I’ve noticed that people who speak many languages have very distinct cadences. I’d be hard pressed to say who I stole that from, but that Victorian way of capitalizing nouns appealed to me.

  9781101986363 (1)

  Many of your characters are veterans, and they have a very intense bond that is not necessarily accessible to the average reader. Are you a veteran yourself, or did you do research into that culture?

  Every day I feel guilty about veterans. It’s amazing how many times veterans make their way into what I write. In Bones, one of the lead characters is a veteran. In The Finder, a show that I created, there was a character who was a veteran with brain damage from explosions. I feel like we live in a culture that does not acknowledge that we are at war. We send people off to war and then blithely live like there’s no war going on. It’s not like other wars we’ve had in history, where we are painfully aware of what’s happening. We’re not rationing butter or tin foil. We just go on as if we live in a world of peace.

  The fact that we live this way and they give up so much—it horrifies me when veterans come back and they aren’t treated like heroes. Because they are heroes, for the most part.

  That’s my highfalutin reason. The less highfalutin reason is that I’m jealous of what I perceive to be bonds that veterans seem to have with each other. They take care of each other. I’ve watched every documentary I can get my hands on, and I’m just fascinated by the way they connect. What the female soldiers put up with, too, is amazing to me. Female vets are going into that male-dominated world and we’ve all heard what they’ve had to put up with.

  The long and short of it is: I envy veterans’ relationships. I think that it’s a magnificent set up for stories. People coming back to a world they barely understand, that they’ve sacrificed so much to protect. They’ve gone through a kiln and none of us who haven’t gone through that experience can know what it’s like. They can really only help each other, so they do. It’s really too good a resource for stories. The vampire part of the writer looks at that and says, “That’s too good of a resource to pass up.”

  There’s a large dichotomy that divides the characters in your novel, and you word it so beautifully: “The people who walk on the surface of the earth, and the other people.” Was that idea important for you to explore, or did it organically form when you started typing?

  I’ve been chewing on this idea for a long time: that some of the people we look upon as heroes were terribly shitty to their loved ones. I’ve never been able to like the Kennedys, especially JFK—the bright, shining president—because he was really shitty to his wife and family. Thomas Mann’s Nobel speech against the Nazis is one of the greatest things ever written. It’s brave, and he had to flee Germany because of it and move to Santa Monica. Yet he was unkind to his wife and children.

  So I’ve always wondered: Are the people who change history able to take care of their families? Can you do both? And it appears as though you cannot. There are very few people who change the world and take care of their interpersonal relationships. This is a theme that has been on my mind since I was a teenager. So it was bound to make its way into the novel.

  You know, I’m a Canadian, so I’m a bit of a lefty. And for a while it appeared that the right-wing politicians seemed to get along better with their families, but they also wanted to destroy the world, as far as I was concerned. Whereas the left-wing politicians wanted to save the world, but they were shitty to their families. That may not be the case anymore because everything now is the dog’s breakfast, but I remember being fascinated by that idea. If your ambitions are to stride across the stage of history, what does that do to your relationships with your loved ones? And I will work on that theme in probably everything I write for the rest of my life, trying to figure it out.

  Here’s what I now know: don’t read biographies or autobiographies of any artists or politicians that you love.

  How does that work for you as a person? You’re a pinnacle in the TV community, and you’re changing minds and hearts, which is the whole crux of changing the world. Have you managed to do something big and important and not become a complete jerk?

  Thank you for thinking anything I’ve done is big and important, but I don’t quite see it that way. There are people who change the medium or change their art form. You’d have to ask my kids if they think I’m a good dad, and I’ve been together with the same woman since 1980. So either they’re wrong or I am. Who knows? Maybe we’re just codependent.

  I haven’t become a mogul. I have a very good friend whose ambitions are to be a mogul, to run a company that has several TV shows running at the same time. I have always been working as the creative head of on one TV show at a time—not two, and certainly not six. I have no desire to be a mogul. I don’t care about winning awards. It would be very nice, but it’s not a desire I have, and I don’t have a desire to change history.

  The only other person to ask me a question like that is Rainn Wilson. We did a show together, and he has a website called Soul Pancake—he’s a spiritual seeker. On his video blog, he asked me what I hope my legacy is in TV, and I had to admit to him that I have no hopes about a legacy in TV. Thank you for letting me have fun and make a living there and write stuff, but I’m not thinking about whether people will be talking about my work in fifty years.

  What is the thing that gets you up in the morning and say, “Yeah, I’m going to bang my head against this keyboard until something good comes out?”

  I’m sure it’s the same thing that makes you do it. It’s a profound question because then you have to ask yourself what happened to you, what happened to any of us who try to make a living out of things in our heads—artists, musicians, entertainers, tap dancers—that would make us want to do this. I can’t think for a minute what that might be, because I had a pretty good childhood. You’re a writer, you’ll know what I’m talking about, and if you have a better way of saying it that would be wonderful: You go to a place, you sit down with your method of creating something, and it’s fun. Well, fun isn’t the right word. It’s satisfying to make something. That’s what I’m going to say.

  I hesitate because TV is very fun. Even with all of its drawbacks—lack of sleep, lots of fighting. Making a television show is buckets of fun because of the people you spend all your time with. I didn’t spend my time with anyone who, at least in my case, wasn’t way more amazing than I am.

  But when you write a book, it’s just you and whatever you use to write, whether that’s a piece of paper or a computer. And I still love going to that place and making something.

  As I was reading, I kept thinking about how many settings throughout the book are worthy of film or TV. I could see those places as sets—visually stunning and very, very expensive. Even though you were working on paper, was there still a part of you that was looking through the camera?

  I am very, very aware that just deciding to write a book after doing TV for three decades doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to write a book. I’ve seen plenty of wonderful novelists turn their hands to writing scripts, and their books are definitely better than their scripts. You have creative habits. When I started out as a writer, I was much more interested in narrative and emotion than I was in cinematic visuals. So I worked very hard as a scriptwriter writing cinematic visuals, and now that’s in my toolbox. It’s just a truism that if you’re designing a TV series and you want a top-notch production designer, then you’d better have something special in the script so that top-notch production designers say, “I want to work on that pilot. I want to work on that show.” That stuff just now bleeds into my writing. I’d have a hard time turning that off.

  Honestly, if I didn’t know anything about this, I would assume that this is your tenth or eleventh book—you’re playing around with the narrative, you’re taking chances. That’s rare even with seasoned novelists. How did you achieve that sense of ease?

  I did get training that would be very hard to get, turning a number of novels into TV shows. If you really want to break down a good novelist, try and turn their stuff into a TV show. I’ve spent years doing that, and I think it gave me a huge advantage.

  If I were teaching writing, I might say, “Break this book down into scenes. Break it down into what is dialogue and prose. Break it down into sheer plot.” I outlined The Driver because I always outlined my scripts, and in that process I realized that somehow in my mind I thought that books were much, much longer than they really are. I had to pull out two thirds of my outline because I just thought books were gigantic. It takes days to read them as opposed to watching something in an hour. And that was just a really valuable lesson: I didn’t need as much plot as I thought I did.

  We’ve talked a lot about your relationship to the world—whether one can achieve great things and still be a good person—but also some of the more flippant aspects of this book. Was it more important to purport these big ideas through the novel, or did you simply want the reader to sit down and completely escape from their life?

  I went with the latter. I just wanted to write an entertaining book that people would like. But when I stumbled across opportunities to do the former, and really talk about things that interest me thematically, I took advantage. I was shocked that no one along the way—my agents at WME and then my editors—told me to take out that Ayn Rand stuff. It was delightful for me to put into Skellig’s mouth what I think about Ayn Rand. I knew that I would be writing a love triangle, forcing him to choose between two women who were wonderful. It was my editor Jess Renheim at Dutton who asked me, “Well, why do they want him?” Which I thought was fantastic. And I thought to myself, “Because he’s the hero of the book.”

  When I started rethinking that love triangle, I realized I’ve got a cop and a lawyer that are best friends. Cops work down here, where the rubber meets the road. Lawyers work in the world of philosophy, esoterica, and history. That’s when those themes leapt into my head because I’ve always wanted to write about them. Essentially, I stumbled across places where I could fulminate on stuff that is near and dear to my heart.

  I started out wanting to make people laugh a little bit and think about veterans as they come back into the world. I thought that would be the more serious part of the book. And then the characters just brought in these other thematic elements.

  Since a lot of our readers are writers, talk to me about the overall process of making this book a reality. From the original idea, to each draft, to the final publication—what were the hard parts? What made the experience different than you thought it would be?

  I’m jealous of people who can write while they’re walking around or in the shower. I’ve always found that I’m not working unless I’ve got my ass in the chair in front of the computer. My deal with the universe was to put my ass in the chair and eventually I’d get bored enough that I’d have to write. To be really pedantic about the process, I decided this time to write longhand with a pen on paper to help me disengage with my well-carved groove of writing scripts. I needed to do everything I could to change into writing prose. My first draft would be chapters or parts of chapters that I would write in longhand. Then, I would take that draft, put it in front of my computer, and type it. What went into my computer was a second draft. I found that process to be delightful.

  I also don’t take lightly the fact that I was important to an agency for my TV work. They want to keep me happy. My TV agent helped me find a literary agent within the same company because they wanted to keep me within that context. That gave me a huge advantage. I automatically had someone representing me as a writer to get someone else to represent me as a writer. My agents Claudia Ballard and Eve Atterman are people who know the book world.

  I also mentioned that I’ve turned a number of novels into TV, so I thought that if I had to, I would ask one of those novelists for help. But I didn’t have to—I was at a huge advantage.

  DMHv2Dani Hedlund published her first novel, Threads of Deception, at the age of eighteen. Experiencing the difficulties of breaking into the market, she founded TBL in 2007 to help other new writers perfect and publish their works. Offering free writing coaching, editing, and publishing guidance, Hedlund expanded TBL into a global community of writers, editors, and artists. In 2010, she pushed the company to new heights, creating TBL’s literary journal, Tethered by Letters Quarterly Literary Journal which has since evolved into F(r)iction Series (published by Sheridan Press), a literary and art collection that pushes the boundaries of conventional storytelling. When not working with the TBL staff, Hedlund spends her days writing, consuming an ungodly amount of caffeine, and binge reading comics.

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Print Marked Items
Hanson, Hart: THE DRIVER
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hanson, Hart THE DRIVER Dutton (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 8 ISBN: 978-1-101-98636-3
Hired as a bodyguard for African-American reality TV star Bismarck Avila, a rapper and skateboard mogul,
"astoundingly vanilla" LA limo driver Michael Skellig draws on his background as an Army Special Forces
officer in Afghanistan to save his client from killers.Skellig graduates from being Avila's driver to being his
bodyguard after he saves the young celebrity--but not one of his 300-pound protectors--from gunmen at a
nightclub. Hard-edged LAPD detective Delilah Groopman, with whom Skellig has had a serious flirtation,
wrongly suspects he killed the muscleman himself, so he must outrun not only the bad guys who are out to
do in Avila, but also the sexy police officer. That becomes exceptionally complicated after Skellig kills a
dirty LA cop who is torturing members of his limo company's team of wounded veterans. Hanson, creator
of the long-running TV series Bones, takes to crime fiction in high style. Like Carl Hiaasen, he shows great
pleasure in combining nasty violence with an arch comic sensibility ("When one is obliged to dispose of a
murdered body, one faces a Gordian knot wrapped around Pandora's box, which contains Occam's razor,"
says Skellig, a nonstop stream of pithy comments). Skellig's crew of Afghanistan veterans is an entertaining
bunch. It includes Tinkertoy, a female mechanic with a quirky case of PTSD, and Ripple, a barely-19-yearold
with issues of his own. The ghostly warnings Skellig hears, in the voice of a terrorist he shot in Yemen,
add to the fun. Bones showrunner Hanson's fresh-voiced first novel is a lark, which is saying something
considering the violence to which its characters are subjected.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Hanson, Hart: THE DRIVER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329278/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=61f58623.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329278
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The Driver
Jane Murphy
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Driver. By Hart Hanson. Aug. 2017. 336p. Outton, $26 (9781101986363).
Remember The Rockford Files'. The A-Team? Hart Hanson, creator of the TV show Bones, delivers all the
punch of a classic television '70s crime show in this remarkable debut. Michael Skellig, an ex-Special
Forces sergeant, is the proprietor of Oasis Limo Services, and his "team" consists of two badly wounded
veterans and his former Afghan interpreter. Skellig drives the mean streets of Los Angeles, a twenty-firstcentury
Philip Marlowe. He can be as tough or as tender as he needs to be. He ruminates on everything from
Hippocrates' humors to the possibility of a Cadillac being haunted. He is wounded in his own way and
haunted by the voices of those he has killed. After he saves a celebrity skateboard mogul from two gunmen,
he ends up working as the man's regular chauffeur while in competition with a rogue cop and some nasty
dudes to find a bunch of barrels that are worth killing for. The dialogue is crisp and street-tough, and the
action redefines relentless. The novel also serves as a moving tribute to the sacrifices of our veterans; their
stories are so harrowing that they can be painful to read. This will appeal to fans of classic hard-boiled
detective novels, but the superhip contemporary tone will also attract millennials. Expect lots of buzz for
what is sure to be one of the seasons hottest first novels.--Jane Murphy
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Murphy, Jane. "The Driver." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 18. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034883/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=08ecc936.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495034883
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The Driver
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p44+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Driver
Hart Hanson. Dutton, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-110-198636-3
Los Angeles limousine driver Michael Skellig, the hero of Hanson's nimbly plotted first novel, has spent the
past 28 hours ferrying around Bismarck Avila, a celebrity skateboard mogul. A former Special Forces
sergeant, Michael is waiting outside a Santa Monica hotel for his client when he believes he hears the voice
of the Chechen torturer he killed a decade before in Yemen warning him of danger. He runs inside the hotel
just in time to save Avila--but not one of his bodyguards--from two gunmen. Michael wakes up hours later
in the hospital only to discover that the police suspect him of the murder. Avila will vouch for Michael with
the LAPD--if Michael agrees to become his full-time personal chauffeur. But the job is more than just
driving Avila: Michael needs to find--and stop--the person who's targeting the skateboarder. Hanson, creator
of the TV series Bones, melds well-placed bits of humor with a serious look at the emotional trials of
returning veterans. The energetic plot demands a sequel. Agents: Eve Attermann and Claudia Ballard,
William Morris Endeavor. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Driver." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500697/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=be18ce59.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500697

"Hanson, Hart: THE DRIVER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329278/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. Murphy, Jane. "The Driver." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034883/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "The Driver." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500697/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

• St Louis Post-Dispatch
  http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/reviews/bones-creator-takes-thrill-ride-with-the-driver/article_ace144e4-8403-5301-bc07-fa401e26916b.html
  Word count: 496

  BOOK REVIEWS
  'Bones' creator takes thrill ride with 'The Driver'
  By Gail Pennington St. Louis Post-Dispatch Aug 6, 2017 (0)
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  Hart Hanson
  "Bones" producer Hart Hanson, in center between David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, follows up the end of his long-running series with a novel.

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  When a long-running television series ends, the creator can be eager to try something different. Hart Hanson followed up 12 seasons of “Bones,” based on novels by Kathy Reichs, with a novel of his own, and it’s a very good one.

  In “The Driver,” Michael Skellig is an ex-soldier who runs a Los Angeles limousine company employing some of the military’s misfits.

  Skellig has a war-tested instinct for danger, and in the opening, a voice in the wind leads him into a nightclub just in time to save his client, a celebrity skateboarder named Bismarck Avila, from a chaotic and confusing attack.

  Conscripted as Avila’s full-time driver, Skellig realizes his real job will be saving Avila from the powerful thug who’s out to get him, and staying alive in the process.

  “The Driver” is much more complicated than that simple summary, but it’s so tightly plotted that giving almost anything away is too much.

  Beyond the plot, though, are the characters, sharply drawn and sympathetic (the heroes) or scary (the villains). Good or bad, they all come alive on the page.

  Skellig himself is often hilarious, employing dry wit and wordplay as weapons. Avila and his girlfriend, Nina, are characters we haven’t seen before, and their interactions with Skellig are unfailingly entertaining.

  The three employees of Skellig’s Oasis Limos are unique and intriguing, including Ripple, a legless veteran, and Tinkertoy, who suffers such bad PTSD that she speaks haltingly and can interact comfortably only with machinery. Lucky, Skellig’s Afghan interpreter, speaks in a delightfully quirky way reproduced on the page with capital letters.

  Hanson also puts two women in Skellig’s life: the lawyer who is the love of his life and the cop he’d surely be dating if she weren’t the lawyer’s best friend. It’s an awkwardly sexy triangle.

  “The Driver” is packed with action, including a breathtaking chase sequence that ends on the Fox lot where Hanson spent so many years. In fact, there’s a lot of Hanson himself here; Skellig shares the author’s sense of humor, as frequently demonstrated in interviews and on Twitter.

  Even though a novel is something different for Hanson, this one isn’t, not really. Just try reading it without casting all the parts in what would make a terrific TV series.

  {&rule}“The Driver”

  A novel by Hart Hanson

  Published by Dutton, 336 pages, $26

• NewsOK
  http://newsok.com/article/5561383/oklahoman-book-review-the-driver-by-hart-hanson
  Word count: 709

  Oklahoman book review: 'The Driver' by Hart Hanson
  Oklahoman Published: August 27, 2017 5:00 AM CDT Updated: August 30, 2017 10:58 PM CDT
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  "The Driver" by Hart Hanson (Dutton, 336 pages, in stores)

  Hart Hanson, creator of the television series "Bones," has written a hugely entertaining thriller as his debut novel, “The Driver.”

  Infused with dark humor, the book contains the over-the-top characters, tough-guy narration and nausea-inducing violence usually found in a grim graphic novel. Not that these are bad things. I loved it. I couldn't stop laughing at the snappy dialogue, the driver-narrator's mocking observations and the crusty military lingo. His insults are like truth-seeking missiles, and he's got enough for everybody.

  The eponymous driver, Michael Skellig, is a former Army Special Forces sergeant who started a limo company to employ a handful of his fellow combat veterans, each operating with his/her own personal set of colorful issues. He is Atlas refusing to shrug away responsibility to take care of those around him. However, this is not a noble, high-minded, sincere tale. This is sardonic mayhem, with extra crunch.

  The story opens with Skellig waiting in the alley behind a Los Angeles hotel for a young celebrity skateboard mogul he has been squiring around the past 28 hours. The voices of those he has killed in the past whisper to him in moments of impending doom, and when he hears “... troubletroublebadtrouble ...” on the Santa Ana wind, he runs through the back kitchen just in time to foil an attempt to murder his client. A bodyguard is not so lucky, and Skellig wakes up in the hospital as the main suspect in a homicide investigation. He becomes drawn into a bloody tale of power, greed and revenge.

  The strength of this novel is the relationship between Skellig and his band of merry misfit employees.

  Tinkertoy is a tall African-American woman who immerses herself in the minutiae of mechanical objects to distract herself from her post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and paranoia. As an Army mechanic assigned to an infantry unit, she was captured, raped and tortured in Iraq.

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  Ripple is a freckled, 19-year-old man with hair like “copper wires” who has anger issues as a double-amputee. He over-self-medicates with medical marijuana toffee bonbons he keeps in an “I Love Jesus But I Still Cuss” fanny pack. My favorite is Lucky, an Afghan interpreter Skellig smuggled into the United States. Lucky and Skellig share a hilarious telepathy developed in numerous Past Situations.

  Hanson uses dialogue ploys to enhance characterization. Tinkertoy speaks in two- and three-word sentence fragments to represent her traumatized brain struggling to connect thoughts. Ripple begins each sentence with “Wait ..." a subconscious strategy to slow down time since lives can be changed forever in the blink of an eye.

  Lucky emphasizes Random Words with Unnecessary Capitalization in a stilted, Victorian, formal letter-writing way. Skellig's feisty mother, a California senator, responds to everything said to her with the same one-curse-word blast. His father, a quiet, peaceful rancher, speaks in soothing fishing analogies.

  This sort of auditory-based writing reminds one of award-winning author Thomas Pynchon and can be both irritating and brilliant. But, again, this is no stuffy, intellectual ramble. This is an absurd romp with a high body count, and those dialogue devices are jokes waiting to happen in various scenes. Hanson's excellent timing, honed through 12 seasons of writing episodic television, makes all this delightful.

  The reader understands at the end that it is the others who keep heroic Skellig on his feet and moving forward on point.

  Does the ghost of Raymond Chandler reside in Hart Hanson, as one famous fellow author suggests in a book jacket blurb? Perhaps. He is certainly one of the many worthy heirs apparent working today.

  — Marcie Everhart, for The Oklahoman

• San Francisco Book Review
  https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/product/the-driver-a-novel/
  Word count: 285

  The Driver: A Novel
  We rated this book:
  $26.00

  Michael Skellig is a former soldier who is haunted by the echoes of war. The ghosts of those he has killed torment him. He never leaves other soldiers behind, as he is running a limo company with three eclectic, damaged veterans. There is Lucky, the Afghan translator; Tinkertoy, the non-verbose mechanic; and Ripple, the handicapped teenager who drives for him. Skellig is the driver for an extreme sportsman named Bismarck Avila. Avila is bathed in the spotlight of the X-Games and reality-show glory. Skellig saves Avila’s life at a nightclub, but his actions have far-reaching repercussions. Avila wants to buy Skellig’s company as well as protection. Skellig is reluctant but soon gives in. Skellig soon finds himself in over his head, attempting to decipher the motive behind Avila’s attempted murder while also dodging a detective who he is smitten with, while also being in love with his own attorney. As the action develops, the bodies keep dropping; bullets fly and Skellig must protect everyone dear to him. Will he be able to emerge unscathed?

  The Driver is an action-packed, humor-infused novel that doesn’t disappoint. Hart Hanson’s debut is chock full of eccentric characters, from soldiers with a cause to crooked cops to diva wannabes. This is a book that is sure to fly from the shelves to the bedside tables.

  Reviewed By: Philip Zozzaro
  Author: Hart Hanson
  Star Count: 5/5
  Format: Hard
  Page Count: 336 pages
  Publisher: Dutton
  Publish Date: 2017-Aug-08
  ISBN: 9781101986363
  Amazon: Buy this Book
  Issue: December 2017
  Category: Mystery, Crime & Thriller
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