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At Risk by Patricia Cornwell

September 1st 2006 03:54

At Risk by Patricia Cornwell

For me a good test for distinguishing a good Patricia Cornwell novel from a bad Patricia Cornwell novel is whether I have finished reading it in one night or not. I have not been able to finish At Risk in one night. That is not to say it is a bad novel. It is just not in the league of Cornwell's other novels.At Risk is also her first thriller that doesn't feature her detective Kay Scarpetta. I never enjoyed Scarpetta as a heroine (she is too much of a cold fish), but I miss those vivid scenes in the cold autopsy room when Scarpetta opens up a body and teases out a mountain of evidence.

Winston Garano is pulled from the middle of his course at the forensic academy by his boss and put on the trail of twenty year old case. His boss, Monique Lamont a district attorney and an Elliot Spitzer clone, wants to run for the governor and hatches a crazy plan wherein she starts a widely-publicised program called At Risk whose motto is "Any Crime, Any Time". Solving any crime anywhere should mak her look good, right? Except that as soon as they start on the case, Winston is burgled and Monique raped and that's just the beginning.

Cornwell's thrillers always had two parts: the forensic investigation itself and the power struggle that happens in the background. At Risk does not feature the former in abundance. It is all power struggle and when we are talking about power struggle here, we are not talking your usual hungry sharks but plain piranhas who won't leave even the bones alone. Cornwell's characters, even the good guys, are always borderline psychopathic but unlike the other connoisseurs of hard-boiled fiction who revel in their character's psychosis and make it enjoyable, Cornwell passes her characters through an ultra-moralistic x-ray scan and the result is an often indigestible mix.

Patricia Cornwell started the art of the forensic thriller. If it weren't for her we wouldn't have all those CSI clones jamming our idiot boxes. Overwhelmed by all those TV shows, she is probably trying to move to new ground, closer to the conventional hard-boiled action thriller. If At Risk is any evidence, that's not working perfectly. Hope she comes back to the autopsy table and cuts open more grisly corpses.

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Codex by Lev Grossman

August 31st 2006 03:41

We are featuring all the Dan Brown’s wannabes this week and today is the turn of Lev Grossman’s Codex.

Codex by Lev Grossman

Edward Wozny is a hotshot investment banker who is shifting his base from New York to London and has a two week holiday for that purpose. Our hero having never had a holiday is quite at a loss until he is called by a mysterious duchess on a mysterious assignment. The client has an old massive library which has never been moved out of its boxes and wants Wozny to move the books out of the boxes and arrange them on the shelf after cataloguing them. Why should an investment banker do this and not a librarian? We don’t know. Our hero initially chafes at the offer and but accepts it later. While arranging the books on the shelves, he is told to look for particularly one book__ a thirteenth- century book called A Viage to the Contree of Cimmerians purportedly written by Gervase of Langford, a compatriot of Chaucer.

Codex author Lev Grossman photo: Mary Pfaff

Edward has a few nerdy friends who give him a game called MOMUS which seems to simulate the daylight events happening to him. Then there is a mysterious duke who is playing a cat and mouse game with the duchess. Edward also meets Margaret, a research student on medieval literature writing a thesis on Gervase, who tells him the history behind the book he is seeking. In the seventeenth century, a hack publisher called Edward Forsyth had published a chapbook which became a sensational bestseller and which he claimed was based on a thirteenth century book of prophecies. Outside this claim however, nobody has ever heard of the book by Gervase and Margaret tells Edward that there was no such book. Before Edward can continue with looking for the book in the library, he is told that his services are no longer required.

We have read and seen this kind of stuff countless time before, haven’t we? A wealthy bourgeois man having a breakdown of conscience. Yeah, instead of helping the poor or joining the Indians, here he unpacks crates of books. What a novelty! Codex is a poorly written book which grafts Ian Caldwell’s The Rule of Four onto Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon. Don’t invest your time in it.

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The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman

August 30th 2006 04:37

The geographer in question is Al-Idrisi twelfth century geographer, whose name if you remember was usually thrown in the clash of civilizations debate two years ago. He first stayed at Baghdad and when things there became too hot, went to Sicilian court, which he left to draw a map of the world. The library in question is the curious collection of items which Al-Idrisi left behind in Sicily, all connected in some way to alchemy. The "library" was first stolen by a thief and then dispersed all over Eastern Europe.

In modern day New England small town called Lincoln, Paul Tomm, a twenty-three year old reporter who works for small community newspaper is asked to do an obituary about a Jaan Puhapaev, a reclusive Estonian professor of Baltic Studies, who has died of natural causes in his home. The facts about the professor are scarce but the few that emerge increase the mystery. The professor walked with a hand gun on his body and fired it no less than two times on the university campus. Why did the university rush to bury these incidents? And what about the surprising statements made by the pathologist who is doing the autopsy that the professor's body is surprisingly young and well-preserved for a man so old? Before he is run down by a wayward car that is?

Paul's assignment now becomes more of an investigative story than an obituary. He is joined in his quest by Paul's former professor and his young nephew who is a police detective. But quest is a big word for this essentially small town arm chair small talk.

Fasman, a reporter for The Economist, writes atmospheric prose that captures the nuances and shades of a small town ably. Also, the novel is peppered with tantalising vistas of Eastern European and ex-Soviet Republic countries and filled with a reporter's wisdom about the nature of tyranny and subversion. But, where it comes unstuck is the plotting. The novel alternates between Paul's fact-hunting for his story and the dispersion of the Al-Idrisi's collection, which in twentieth century is being slowly reassembled back. The two tracks run separately for a majority of the novel and they but coalesce briefly in the denouement where a bunch of old immortals pop up and tell Paul that he is too small to deal with big issues so back off, which being " the moderately moderate" he is, he does.

Before they vanish however, they give a lecture as to the clue of what it was all about. It is here when Fasman begins to explain alchemy, the casus belli of the plot, the novel rises above the maudlin humdrum of Katherine Neville's Motaigne chess set or Kate Mosse's labyrinthine grail and others like them. Fasman's alchemy is all about transformation and as he remarks Al-idrisi's transformative journey began from Baghdad and ended in Talinn, a former Soviet bloc. Surely he doesn't mean……?

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The Eight by Katherine Neville

August 29th 2006 02:53

Long before Dan Brown even put pen to paper, long before the scholarly and literate thrillers based on some obscure European painting or the holy grail became a cottage industry, Katherine Neville wrote The Eight.

Charlemagne, the Frankish emperor is presented with a magnificent chess set by an Arabic subject. The chess set itself taps into power of the universe and hence, the mad scrambling for it. Charlemagne orders that it should be hidden away and it is promptly buried in a castle which later becomes a convent. Though hidden away, its secret was always known to a few power hungry tyrants down the ages and they all made an attempt to retrieve it. It is the time of French Revolution and the convent is about to be seized. So, the abbess divides the chess set into eight pieces and distributes it among eight nuns who are to protect it with their lives. For some reason, she gives the most vital part to a pair of giggling girls who are to act as collecting points for the rest of the group too. Predictably, they straight away walk into the arms of Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun who was after the chess set in the first place. From now on, Talleyrand, Robespierre, Wordsworth, pretty much every historical ghost whose name you have ever heard pops up and throws his hat into the ring.

The novel's heroine in the present, Catherine is a computer whiz kid who is promoted to a post in Algeria as a punishment for her sincerity. Last heard, Algeria is where the chess set was rumoured to be. Before she goes there, she is forced to befriend a chess-playing feminist Lily and influence her in a positive way. Lily takes her to a chess tournament where the Russian grandmaster Solarin is playing after so many years. Somebody is killed at the tournament and mayhem ensues.

The novel's historical pieces are amazing. One can only wistfully imagine what a wonderful historical novel Neville could have written if only she stuck to the form. But, all that good is undone by the most jejune action writing I ever read. Once, Solarin looks into Catherine's eyes and says, "You should not have come here", you roll your eyes too. And it only gets worse from there.

But The Eight was a huge success and still commands a following of many loyal fans. But if you read it now, it is only interesting in the sense that it shows you the first baby steps taken before Dan Brown arrived to assimilate this material properly in a thriller.

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In the Cut by Susanna Moore

August 24th 2006 04:14

Meg Ryan has tired of her cutie-pie roles because her body has outgrown them and picked up Susanna Moore's In The Cut as the magic dress that would fit her body well. The movie quickly tanked and the audience would rather not see this not-so cute Meg banged by Mark Ruffalo. But that's beside the point.

Frannie is a divorced thirty something woman who is living alone in New York. She teaches English when she is not collecting word lists of street vernacular. She also has an ominous-looking student stalking her which she does not seem to bother her. One day in a bar she sees through a curtain of darkness, a redhead giving head to a man with a tattoo. And then the redhead turns up dead. And the man with the tattoo knocks up her door to investigate the death of the redhead. Is it the same man? She is not so sure but she sure does get knocked up by him. And the more she gets she knocked, the more suspicious she gets and the more suspicious she gets, the more her craving for getting knocked by him. This is the danger that we were promised. After all this is a dangerous erotic thriller and everything you know about desire is just dead wrong.

Frannie might be looking for dangerous thrills to frill her sex life but to a cynical mind, she invites Detective James Malloy (that's the guy with the tattoo, if you believe Frannie) repeatedly into her life because his idea of sex is to pleasure the organ, you know the only one made purely for pleasure or so we are told, and to drown in it. Some danger.

Curiously, for a novel written by a woman, Moore inflicts the same fate on her heroine which we thought was practised only by the harsher sex. And the only other notable (and curious) thing about it is how far the novel manages to objectify men.

If you are looking for the erotic or the thrilling, clearly in the cut is not the place to be.

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The Double Eagle by James Twining

August 22nd 2006 03:21

In 1933, in the middle of Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order which removed the gold standard. Hundreds of freshly minted 1933 twenty dollar coins called double eagles were then melted down. Officially, 1933 double eagles were not supposed to exist. But ten survived. James Twining’s new thriller The Double Eagle uses this fact as its plot-theme.
The novel begins with a murder of Paris priest whose body is dumped in the side-by river. Nothing remarkable about the murder except that during autopsy the victim’s stomach yields the rarest of rare coins, the 1933 Double Eagle.
FBI springs into action and the case is handled by Agent Jennifer Browne, an attractive young woman who is struggling to overcome a past judgement error which proved fatal to her career. Her investigation leads to Fort Knox where the ten Double Eagles which escaped melting are stored only to find that all the ten coins are missing. The early suspect is one Tom Kirk, a renegade CIA agent who is now an art thief.
Tom Kirk is introduced to us stealing a Fabourge egg in a nice action set piece. Tom has tired of his stealing ways and wants this to be his last assignment. But his boss, Archie is bound to a shadowy figure named Cassius and will not let him go easily. Cassius could be Van Simmons, a cruel Dutch entrepreneur who is also after the Double Eagles. Or someone else.
Twining doesn’t waste time and moves from one action scene to another with effortless ease pulling us along the way. The wire stunts, and the novel is packed with them, should be mouth-watering to action buffs. The characters are nicely etched and the novel is punctured with delightful humour too. All in all, it makes for a great reading.
James Twining’s next Tom Kirk novel,

is out and will be featured here in future.

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Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

August 21st 2006 04:44

The blurb announces an author with impressive pedigree. Kate Mosse is the co-founder of Orange Prize for Fiction and has a European Woman of Achievement award, so you’d think she’d be able to come up with a decent novel. Except when it comes to writing fiction, it doesn’t help how many prizes you’ve helped to establish.

Labyrinth starts with an archaeological dig at some remote corner of France. Alice Tanner is temping there for her vacation and led by some voice in her head opens up a cave when no one is looking. The cave has a few skeletons, a book, a ring and a labyrinth. Though the skeletons look at least a few centuries old, the local police seizes the site as a crime scene and enter a villainous lawyer, the first among many, whose is after the book and the ring. Soon enough, Alice is drawn into the intrigue.

Meanwhile, Alice’s thirteenth century incarnation Alais, finds a dead body floating in a river. This eventually leads Alais to find out that her father, a steward to the local king, has a secret past. He is one of the group of five sworn to protect the Holy Grail, not a cup but a labyrinth and its secret formula written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and divided into three books. One who collects all the three books and reads aloud the formula over the labyrinth can invoke the magic of the Grail and become immortal.. Meanwhile, the Pope has declared the fourth Crusade, this time on European soil, whose aim is to wipe out Cathars, a Christian sect which resembles Gnostics in many ways. Among the furious host of French army are people who already know the secret of the Grail and will go to any lengths to collect the books and the grail. I don’t see why they bother, seeing every bit player in this set up re-incarnates again and again. While her father battles on to save their city from the advancing Crusade Army, Alais is entrusted with protecting the secret.

Mosse’s descriptive powers are poor and her plotting standard and the big book is filled with only a few scattered minor thrills. She spends inordinate amount of time on inconsequential incidents until she is through to sixty percent of the novel, when she suddenly wakes up to the reality that she has a lot of ground to cover and therefore, brushes off major action and perhaps the only interesting portion of the novel in a few conversations. The only redeeming feature of the novel is that it projects a genuine sense of evil about the Crusades. By the way, the French are the bad guys in this one. Seeing what they are coming up with in L’Affaire Lebanon, that should detract a little from the novel’s many weaknesses.

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