Category: Mysteries

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Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell

OK, this review includes a spoiler alert. If you plan on reading this book, although I can’t imagine why, don’t read this review.

Kay Scarpetta is on her way to the Georgia Women’s prison, somewhere between Savannah and the coast. There she meets the mother of the woman who tried to kill her in some previous novel. The mother had abused Kay’s assistant when he was a young boy. The offspring of that affair is the woman who tried to kill Kay. Confused enough? The novel doesn’t really try to untangle all those messy relationships. Reading it was like watching the second to last show of a TV miniseries without the benefit having seen any of the preceding shows.

The first part of the novel needed some serious editing. It slogs along, slowly, painfully. We live in Kay’s head and it’s not an interesting place to be. There are endless conversations that don’t advance the plot one bit nor do they reveal much about the character, except that Kay is full of herself.

The pace picks up in the last hundred and fifty pages. Finally, there’s some tension and you actually look forward to turning the page. The finale turns out the worst possible way to end a novel. The evil sister of the evil daughter did it. Huh? You read right, the killer never once appeared in the entire novel. She just popped into the plot in the last chapter. Anyone taking mystery writing 101 knows that that’s total cop out. It cheats the reader.

I think part of the problem is that once a writer becomes a superstar like Cornwell, the publishers don’t bother to properly edit their books anymore. Who’s going to tell Cornwell to change this or that, to cut the beginning, or come up with a decent ending? Some poor copy editor who’s paid by the word? That’s not going to happen. The result is something like Red Mist.

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The Affair by Lee Child

Not just Star Wars has prequels. Jack Reacher does, too. The Affair is Child’s sixteenth book in the Jack Reacher series. The action takes place in 1997, before Child’s first Reacher novel, The Killing Floor. Reacher is still an army cop with the rank of major. Despite the skirmishes in the Balkans, the U.S. military is on a peace footing. Remember, this is four years before September 11, 2001.

Cuts are coming. Everybody knows that. The U.S. army establishment is most worried because the army is the largest branch of the military and stands to lose the largest amount of funding. The last thing the army needs is bad publicity. So when a young woman is found murdered near an army base in Mississippi, Reacher is sent undercover to the town to keep taps on local law enforcement and make sure no surprises happen before the army brass knows it. A colleague of his is sent to the base to investigate on the inside.

This marks Reacher’s first mission in civilian clothes. He has to shop for them since he’s gotten all his clothes from the army before. The novel is also the first time Reacher rides the bus, hitchhikes and walks to get where he needs to be. All modes of transport we have encountered in his other novels.

Continue reading “The Affair by Lee Child”

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Bandits by Elmore Leonard

Bandits titleBandits was the second read in my recent Leonard binge. It was the best so far. I liked the set up, the characters and the way the plot unfolded and reached a climax.

Not quite rehabilitated jewel thief Jack Delany works at his brother-in-law’s funeral parlor. No way does he do any of the embalming and other prep, but he drives the hearse to pick up dead bodies and works as a gofer around the place. When he’s asked to pick up a body from the leper hospital, he really doesn’t want to go, but the brother-in-law prevails.

The body, it turns out, is not dead. Jack is supposed to smuggle the ex-girlfriend of a Nicaraguan Contra colonel who has vowed to kill her. Lucy, a nun, or rather ex-nun as Jack finds out  soon enough, accompanies Jack in the hearse. She gives him a quick run down of why his previous skill set might come in very handy in making sure the ruse works.

What follows is a fast and funny romp against the backdrop of the Reagan administration’s overt and covert aid to the Contras to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. There are ultra-rich conservatives who donate cash to defeat communism, crooked Contras who think living in Miami with the donated cash is preferable to Managua and the former jailbirds Jack recruits to steal the cash from the Contras.

Leonard’s dialog really shines in this novel. It’s tight and funny. It made me laugh out loud several times.

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Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

Djibouti Book CoverThe death of Elmore Leonard spurred me on to read more of his books. The one book I had read earlier, Tishomingo Blues, was fun but not particularly memorable. I started with Djibouti because I’m always interested to find out how crime writers treat Africa.

The protagonists are Dara Barr, an American documentary film maker and Xavier LeBo, her cameraman, grip and man for all purposes. Dara is in Djibouti because she wants to make a documentary about the Somali pirates who had been destabilizing the sea routes around the Horn of Africa. Xavier has rented a trawler to take her to Eyl in Somalia, a town considered to be the stronghold of the Somali pirates.

Other characters include Harry, an anglicized Saudi who working as a negotiator for the International Marine Organization. Billy Wynn, a rich man sailing around the world with his would-be wife Helene. Idris, a pirate leader and playboy. And Jama, an American born muslim convert.

The action moves from Djibouti to Eyl and back to Djibouti. At first, the plot is meandering and not really focussed. Slowly, though, the story begins to gel and focuses on a possible terrorist act to be committed by al Qaeda affiliated terrorists who sought shelter among the pirates in Somalia. From then on, the race is on to stop the terrorists.

I liked the book alright. There were some very quirky characters. But it isn’t a favorite. The complexity of Somali piracy was reduced to a simple dichotomy. Dara believes they are poor fishermen who got the short end of the stick and try to get even by hijacking the ships that are violating their territorial waters. Xavier believes they are all crooks. Once the terrorism angle is added, even that level of complexity falls by the wayside.