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3.0 out of 5 stars
Feels like a chapter from a longer work., Dec 28 2001
Like many other readers, I delight in Bill James's black and mordant humor, his quirky criminals, his patently self-serving and idiosyncratic police force, his often hilarious use of irony, and his word games. I love his satire of upwardly mobile petty crooks, neurotic psychologists who play kinky sex games, and insecure police officials who play head games, not only with the scoundrels they pursue but with each other. But I did not love this book, which, unlike other Harpur and Iles novels I've read, feels more like a mechanical chess game than a contest between people of feeling.Many members of this large cast of characters--both police and crooks--are repeats from other, earlier novels, so idiosyncratic that those of us who have read the earlier books have vivid memories of their behavior and eccentricities and can generally remember who is who. Unfortunately, the author provides very little help for the new reader. Almost all the crooks have nicknames--Panicking, Lovely Mover, Rt. Hon., Noisy, Corporeal-and some also use aliases, and it sometimes takes many pages to recognize that this nickname, that name, and some alias are all the same person. The complications become even greater here since the action evolves from the changing alliances of various criminal groups as they separately try to convince Ralph Ember, Panicking Ralph, a bar owner, to join them and allow them to use his bar as a drug distribution point. No one, including the reader, is sure who is selling out whom. Even the author seems to recognize the confusion he's created. Near the end of the novel, the chief calls a meeting, at which he pushes forward a display stand, announcing that he has prepared some visual aids to help with the overview of the situation. He says, "I found that the complexities of recent happenings were beginning to slide into a...kind of chaos. I felt we all needed...some graphic means to make things coherent." Unfortunately, the "graphic means" come too late to make much difference with this book. The author has reserved yet another series of surprises for the last three or four pages, leaving open the possibility that these happenings are just the intro to another Harpur and Iles novel.
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