Knuckleduster

Veteran soldier Brody “Knuckleduster” Calhoun, blinded in an ambush and dependent on beta-carotene contact lenses for sight, spends his days doing community service and his nights as a vigilante, delivering violent revenge to abusive boyfriends and husbands on behalf of women who pay him for help. When Thorp Ashbury, Brody’s old army buddy, enlists his help to find Thorp’s missing sister, the trail leads them to a corporation whose mind-control experiments have driven a veteran to commit mass murder. The awkward premise sags further under Post’s erratic prose (“He, unlike many of the averted-eyed masses, gazed unflinchingly into the vacuous abyss that mankind had chiseled itself into”) and distracting perspective shifts, and the pacing is too slack for a thriller; too much time is spent on a serial killer with the improbable name of Titian Shandorf and a threadbare connection to the central conspiracy. Reader interest is likely to wander well before the plot starts to cohere in the second half. (Mar.)