ark Williams writes his heroes the way God probably sees us. We find them stumbling around in their own personal battles: grizzled, failed, weary, tough and cynical. They have a great heart, but it’s had the life nearly kicked out it by failure, pain or rejection. They drink too much scotch and employ language usually reserved for dockworkers and pirates. But near their lowest, they find themselves inexorably drawn into a life altering, life revealing chain of events. From somewhere within, they discover themselves responding with bravery they didn’t know they possessed. I think that’s how God probably sees us all: messed up and full of compromised sludge, without the slightest awareness that our moment to shine is waiting, just around the corner.
His hero is usually encouraged and reminded of his purpose by a partially-sane vagrant, or some such sketchy character. In speaking wisdom through them, his books give strange and wonderful dignity to the forgotten, misplaced, rumpled and ignored.
Smack dab in the middle of the most dangerous scenes is where you discover some of the best humor. And oh, there is humor! There are one-liners in here worth admission to an overpriced Vegas buffet!
Toss in his ability to seat you in a neighborhood bar-where undercover cops swap war stories…or an evacuated office where you learn horribly close-up how trigger pins detonate in explosives-and you’ve got a page-turner like few others.
Mark has this great ability to show the invisible thread woven throughout each of our lives-giving meaning to every moment; especially the ones that presently make no sense.
Mark has become a writer worthy to stand with the “big boys of fiction.” He’s learned to tell a story you don’t want to end. I think it’s because your not reading a rehashed plot a ghost writer has reworked for an author who has run out of good ideas. Mark’s letting us into how he sees life. He somehow convinces us that this life, in all its pain and ugliness, is still worth hanging around for. Because that moment is coming…where all the unraveled threads form a tapestry…where the good guy’s unseen courage gets displayed…where you finally see that your day to day life actually counts…where the garbled mess of real life turns on a dime, just when you’d feared it was all a random hoax. And he hands this gift to all of us who read along with him. You’re in for a wild and delightfully redeeming ride. Enjoy the pie!
