Genre-jumping novelist Dan Simmons makes a splash no matter where he leaps. His 1985 horror debut,
The Song of Kali, garnered the World Fantasy Award; the vampiric
Carrion Comfort took the Bram Stoker Award;
Hyperion, the opening volume of his Hyperion saga, snagged the Hugo. In 1999's
The Crook Factory, Simmons spun fact, fiction, and Ernest Hemingway into a ripe WWII spy thriller, and with
Darwin's Blade, Simmons dives headlong into the suspense pool.
The country's foremost accident investigator, Dr. Darwin Minor, reconstructs automobile accidents for his friends, Lawrence and Trudy Stewart, whose firm specializes in uncovering lucrative, yet unremarkable, insurance fraud. Odd, then, that two Russian hit men in a souped-up Mercedes E 340 attempt to murder Dar in a 160 mph car chase that results in an airborne Mercedes and two dead Russians.
Sydney Olson, the California state's attorney's chief investigator, who's investigating an accomplice-murdering fraud ring, plans to release a story highlighting the Russian mafia's involvement and Dar's name, and then to spend a lot of bodyguard-time with Dar.
Dar returned her challenging gaze. Suddenly she did not look like Stockard Channing to him anymore. "You're staking me out like that goat in the dinosaur movie... Jurassic Park." "Exactly," said Sydney Olson, smiling openly at Dar now.
Lawrence raised his hand like a schoolboy.
"I just don't want to find my friend Dar's bloody leg on my moon roof someday, okay?"
As the bond between Dar and Sydney grows, so grow the assassination attempts, a gruesome body count, and the realization that a state-wide charitable organization funded by the country's most famous defense attorney is behind the murderous ring.
With its tight plot, memorable and likable cast, and brisk, intelligent narrative, Darwin's Blade has "series" written all over it. Better make room on the Edgar dais now. --Michael Hudson
H"Stupidity kills. Absolute stupidity kills absolutely." Simmons, who has moved effortlessly from horror (Children of the Night) to science fiction (Hyperion; Endymion) to thrillers (The Crook Factory) obviously had a lot of fun writing this gripping suspense thriller about automobile insurance fraud rackets in Southern California. Former NTSB investigator Dr. Darwin Minor (Ph.D., physics) is the best at what he does. As the country's leading "accident reconstruction specialist," Darwin has saved the insurance industry millions, as well as solving the most confounding cases of vehicular stupidity. But suddenly, he finds himself the target of assassins, resulting in a wild car chase that is only the first of many spellbinding set pieces. Is Darwin being targeted for business reasons, or is the attack somehow tied to the ongoing federal investigation of the Alliance, a Russian mafia-type group that specializes in staging accidents to perpetrate insurance fraud? A delightfully bizarre inside joke concerns the "Darwin Awards," which celebrate those who improve the human gene pool by removing themselves from it, like the young man who attempts to break the land speed record by attaching a couple of rockets to his '82 El Camino and ends up splattered on a cliff face hundreds of feet above the highway. In the course of the novel, Darwin investigates several accident scenes that duplicate either Darwin Award-winning demises or urban legends. A breezy writing style, rollicking humor and ingenious descriptions of weird accidents make this action-packed thriller a real winner. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
