From Library Journal
Thorn, last spotted in the best-selling Buzz Cut (LJ 5/15/96), must come to grips with his own paralysis?the result of a savage beating?while holed up in a pain clinic run by a mad scientist.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Hall's hermit-sleuth Thorn has long been one of the most appealing and complex characters in crime fiction, but here he extends his range still further, taking the Travis McGee^-style genre hero to an altogether new level. Ensconced in his Key Largo beach house, Thorn seems to have carved a lasting separate peace with the modern world until a senseless crime drives the other side of his personality to the fore, the side that says, "There's something broken, and I have to fix it." What's broken this time, though, is Thorn himself, mysteriously paralyzed from the waist down after attempting to confront an apparent prowler. The story begins with the slaughter of several dolphins--killed for their endorphins, the key ingredient in a miracle, pain-killing drug--and extends to Thorn's distant past and his relationship with his best childhood friend, who has been nursing a grudge against Thorn for decades. All of Thorn's unresolved conflicts--Is he running away from the world or trying to save it?--come to the fore here, as Hall makes his hero (and the reader) face simultaneously the pain of powerlessness and the selfishness at the heart of a knight errant's gallantry. And yet, we cheer when Thorn sallies forth one more time, wheelchair-bound but determined to draw on the "white knot of gristle at his stubborn core." Melding the magnetic pull of the archetypal hero on a quest with the flesh-and-blood humanity of a vulnerable man trapped between conflicting needs, Hall masterfully works both ends of the genre street, transforming the beach-bum sleuth into an everyman while at the same time allowing readers to wonder if perhaps we, too, might find a stubborn core of our own, if only we plumbed deep enough. Popular fiction at its absolute best.
Bill Ott
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
