Brutus
By Ron Fuller Welch
ISBN-10 : 1701818426
Just what can’t Ron Fuller do? The third generation wrestler and promoter, who branched out into minor league hockey ownership when the territory era of wrestling was ending, now turns his hand to writing fiction, a thriller set in his former wrestling home of Knoxville, Tennessee.
The titular main character is not a person, but a lion. And not your warm and cuddly Born Free lion, but a man-eating king of the jungle that has travelled across the continent, hunting two-legged prey. One of his victims, an American trapped named George Steadman, along with his partner Natu, finally manages to capture the great beast and arranges to have him shipped to his employer, the Knoxville Zoo.
And George has the worst of ulterior motives, wanting to get revenge on the animal that took his leg. But what does not plan on is the weird bond that forms between Brutus and George’s nephew Jeb, who works under George in the carnivore department of the zoo.
Needless to say, things do not go as planned once Brutus gets to the zoo. The opening ceremony for the lion’s arrival, planned by the Zoo’s director against George’s advice, goes horribly wrong. And why won’t the great beast eat the slaughtered animals that Jeb provides him?
After a series of events that sees Brutus transferred to the Charlotte Zoo, things go from bad to worse when a landslide in the Great Smoky Mountains frees Brutus from his transport and the killer lion is free to hunt at will in one of America’s biggest national parks. The race is on to capture the lion before the body count gets out of hand.
The novel does a great job in introducing a diverse cast, including a displaced Australian police detective and his family, an ambitious TV reporter, the vain and pompous zoo director and a number of hunters and trappers that come to try and capture Brutus. And Fuller manages to keep ratcheting up the tension, as the deaths continue. A scene late in the book, where the lion has trapped some people in a car, was very reminiscent of the scene in Cujo when the dog menaces some victims also stuck in a car.
Although the book is set in the present, Fuller has said it was originally written years ago and only recently dusted off and published. It certainly feels like a classic Hollywood thriller. I was imagining George C Scott as George Steadman and a young Anthony Perkins as Jeb.
Brutus is a page-turner that was hard to put down, especially once the hunter for The lion begins in the National Park. A great effort from a first-t8me author, albeit one who spent decades writing a different kind of fiction, with a different kind of pencil.
You can order Brutus from Amazon or from Ron directly at tnstud.com, where you can also get an autographed copy.
