“Bonus Man” by Will Tinkham (Americana series)

This is the seventh book in the Americana series by Will Tinkham that I have read, and I definitely don’t plan to stop until I read them all. Thanks to the author’s immaculate skill, each story fuels my desire to learn more about the diverse set of characters he created. On the pages of this saga, the most vivid and controversial moments of American history come alive, peppered with humour and satire and through the lens of ordinary people’s lives.

“Bonus Man” begins with the string of misfortunes stalking Adam Bonifacius like a persistent maniac, with his devious mind set on turning his victim’s life into complete misery. I confess, for about one-third of the book, I’d even been thinking that this book was going to be vastly different from other Americana novels. Well, I needn’t have worried. The author, after making his readers feel the whole plethora of emotions together with the main character, from deep sympathy to boiling rage, throws us into something completely unexpected. And we are left to laugh, giggle, and blush about the life of Bonus Man, aka Doc Bozeman, aka Smedley Pepper, who, being one man, was able to settle into a versatile array of roles with the ease and authenticity that would make renowned actors cry with envy.

Adam Bonifacius takes us with him on his journey towards justice and happiness, and the way the author describes it makes his sojourn feel like your own. The journey starts in 1932 in Washington D.C., where the Bonus Army, the veterans of World War I, try to use their right of peaceful protest, demanding promised cheques for their service to the homeland, which never materialised, only to face the government’s right to use tanks and tear gas in delivering their opinion.

Having escaped both tanks and gas, Adam trudges back to where he lives with his wife and little son, only to find that his family has left him.

Determined not to get crushed by yet another blow of fate, Adam decides to pursue his dream to become a doctor. During the war, he was a medic, and his duties mainly included tending to bedpans and laundry. Still, once he was forced to act as a real doctor, and he saved his superior’s life. It became clear that he had a true talent. No one, least of all Adam himself, could imagine how many obstacles would be strewn on his road to add an official paper to this talent.

An unfortunate encounter with a maniac unexpectedly provides Adam with funds, which the government refused to provide. Yet, as anything acquired from a criminal source, they come with complications. To add to Adam’s troubles, he falls in love – and at first sight at that – only to be forced to run away, from the bride-not-to-be and the sort of stable life – if residing with a moonshiner in the middle-of-nowhere-mountains can be called that. Before he flees, he manages to perform a heroic deed, one in a very long line of heroic deeds that seem to do more harm than good to him.

Then, living under yet another alias, he falls in love again – not falling out of love with the previous beauty who captured his heart.

I know you won’t believe me, but all that is only the beginning of Adam Bonifacius’s extraordinary story, so I haven’t given out much. You don’t have any other choice than to read the book to learn about how the man could get himself entangled with the loudest names in the criminal arena of the era – think John Dillinger and Ma Barker – and how he ended up being almost a prime FBI suspect in the Lindbergh kidnapping, and how his two love and one runaway-wife-who-took-away-his-son stories turned out. I guarantee that you wouldn’t be able to predict the outcomes of any of these adventures.

Again, a special, heartwarming experience was ‘meeting’ Aunt Emily and her clan from previous books. Interweaving stories that connect the whole saga in a wholesome narrative, a patchwork of fates of different people, is what, to me, makes the Americana series an unsurpassed reading experience.