The Mystery Starts Here

This is one of the best suspense novels I’ve read in a long time.  I read it almost all the way through without stopping and would have expect for those pesky things like cooking dinner, walking the dogs and…sleeping! From the opening sentence, I was hooked.

“I’ve always wondered what people felt like in the final few hours of their lives.”

The narrator, Sandra Jones, a young mother, wife and teacher, continues to describe her normal evening up till she’s in bed and then, she hears a noise in the hall and… he steps into the room.She doesn’t scream – she doesn’t want to wait her daughter.  Do you have shivers yet? I sure did. From there the story jumps to Sergeant Detective D.D. Warren of the Boston Police Department who is assign to a missing persons case – yup, Sandy Jones. D.D. goes to the Joneses house and is struck by how normal it is….almost staged. Not too messy, not too neat. She’s puzzled that the Jason Jones waited almost three hours before calling the police. He is a devoted father to his four-year-old daughter, Ree, a precocious  little cutey. The young couple don’t have friends or relatives. They go to work, take care of their child and are….normal. Or are they? We know right away that Jason has secrets, bad ones.

From there the book is told in alternating voices: D.D., Jason, Sandy’s  emotionally cold husband, a neighbor and several other minor players. When Jason is confronted in his backyard by Aiden Brewster, the neighbor, the man tells him he heard a car by the Jones’ house in the middle of the night. Jason is suspicious of the man – was his wife having an affair with Aiden? They are close to the same age and live only a few houses apart. Aiden warn Jason that the cops will be looking at him. After all, isn’t it usually the husband who did it?

There are so many twists and turns in the book that it leaves you breathless. So many possibilities – so many suspects. Both Sandy and Jason have secrets in their pasts, and Gardner teases us throughout the book, only letting a little out at a time until – well, you just cannot put the book down. While I thought the ending was a bit rushed, it was still satisfying because all or most of the loose ends were neatly tied up. Is there a happy ending? You’ll have to get a copy of the book to find out! I’m not telling!

If you read this blog at all, you’ll know I gushed over Marshall Karp’s second Lomax & Biggs book, “Blood Thirsty.” It was gritty, witty, and a fast read. I couldn’t wait to get to the library to find other books by Karp. I was delighted when I saw his first novel, “The Rabbit Factory” sitting on the shelf! I snatched it, brought it home and started to read it immediately.

Imagine my surprised when I found none of the humor of his second book! Oh, there are a few jokes, but most are lame and just not that funny.  The second and worse problem is that this book is WAY too long! It’s 574 pages and would have been a good book at about 350. There are a couple of subplots that add nothing to the story and should have been dropped. You know what Elmore Leonard says in his 10 rules of good writing – “Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.” Well, Karp had a LONG sub-plot about Mike Lomax dead wife that….I skipped. I’m sure Karp was trying to establish something about the character for future books (the dead wife is mentioned in “Blood Thirsty), but come on! It’s sad, tragic and has nothing to do with the plot of the book! The author could have given us the basics in a page or less. There’s a shorter but equally unnecessary sub-plot about Mike’s brother – who is 32 but sounds more like 12!

Okay, the premise of this book is that someone is killing people related to Dean Lamaar’s Familyland – a Disney clone. We start off when the signature character, Rambunctious Rabbit is strangled in one of the underground tunnels beneath Familyland. Lomax and Biggs are assigned the case and before they can even start investigating, one of Lamaar’s most famous male movies stars is murdered. Each victim has a similar clue on its body, is killed with something that can be bought in a Familyland gift store and the cops are afraid a serial killer is targeting Lamarr’s staff. When the chief  (and apparently ONLY)  CSI determines there were two different killers, the boy are stumped. That part bugged me a bit, too. The killings continue in different parts of LA  and yet the same female forensic technician shows up at all the crimes scenes to make semi-funny remarks and discover important clues. Come on! They work in shifts and there are, of necessity, a lot of them. That’s one thing that irks me when reading mysteries. I read a lot of them. I write them. I volunteered at the Sheriff’s Department for two years to gain information. If you’re going to write a mystery, for God’s sake get the procedures right. Okay, end of rant.

The first two-thirds of the book are a mess – rambling and hard to follow. Those darn sub-plots sure don’t help. In the last part of the book, all the clues come together and it’s a decent read. I was actually surprised at the ending, which is rare for me.

I have to say, if the author had been an ordinary person, this big, bloated, boring, book in this form never would have been published – however, he’s a friend of James Patterson. Nuff said.