Review: Believe Me

Claire wants a job, but she cannot legally work because she is a British citizen here in the U.S. without a green card. She has to live, to eat, to get from place to place. What will she do? 

Claire works for an attorney. She tries to get married men to cheat on their wives -- and they do, frequently. Her roommate's father is urging her roommate to ask more and more money from Claire to pay for the rent. Claire does her best. She uses her acting skills and a somewhat checkered past in acting to get the goods on philandering husbands. But then she hooks up with another woman who wants to know what her husband is up to and it all goes wrong. 

She was supposed to be the husband's type and she did get his attention in the bar where they met, but he didn't bite. He told Claire he was married and walked away. Problem is that Claire is attracted to him and his wife is convinced he is a serial killer. But she likes him no matter what  his wife says. Claire believes him and she is willing to get closer to him, which is what the police and the profiler want. Claire wants that too, not only because she will hopefully end up with the charismatic professor but because she can prove his murdered wife wrong and vindicate him. Or she will end up back in Britain without her acting career and out of the United States without her promised green card. 

"Believe Me" is a slow chase through the deep, dark recesses of the mind with no way out for law abiding Claire and no trophy when she crosses the line. It will be her life versus her acting career, both of which will end without roses, and soon if she cannot find the right path through the mind maze before her. 

Delaney juggles with the facts and the reality with finesse and sends Claire and the reader down a long, dark road that runs through the catacombs beneath Paris to come out with her life and the reader's satisfaction. Long and harrowing at times, but centers on Claire and the professor with a satisfying payoff in the end. `"Believe Me" reminded me of M. J. Rose but was definitely not a copycat book or in the same vein. Delaney writes with subtlety and not without Rose's passion, but ends with a good and different book. "Believe Me" was believable and just long enough to whet the reader's appetite for more, as well as giving enough history to interest the reader in other writers like Flaubert and his peers. With poetry like that which is quoted in "Believe Me" the age of reason was quite a bodice-ripping time.

Review: Blind Fury by Lynda La Plante

Detective Inspector Anna Travis has a new case. A young woman was raped, strangled, murdered, and then thrown into a field a service station on the M1 outside London. Three more cold cases are linked to the murder, victims of a serial killer, but something is off. DI Travis can feel it and so can her boss Detective Chief Supervisor Langton, her ex-lover.

The man in their sights works for Swell Blinds. John Smiley is all that he seems and more. No one has a bad word to say about him and he is very cooperative in the investigation when brought in for questioning about his work van parked in the lot at the time of the murders and caught on CCTV.

Although, Smiley looks too good to be true, Langton has a feeling they have the right man. The problem is they have nothing to tie Smiley to the women except being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Feelings aren't enough to go on. That's why Langton was willing to send Anna to Barfield Prison to interview a serial killer she helped catch.

Cameron Welsh is obsessed with Anna and she doesn't believe Welsh has anything to add to their case. Anna follows orders and interviews Welsh several times. Beneath the arrogance, Welsh knows more than he says and he continues to dangle the bait to draw Anna closer, and she comes closer than she cares to come to trap Smiley.

Cameron Welsh tells Anna Travis that no matter how careful a murderer is, there's always a witness, which provides one of the main themes in Lynda La Plante's latest thriller, Blind Fury. Witnesses pop up all through the novel and La Plante uses them to good effect.

At first glance, it seems as though Welsh is Hannibal Lecter to Anna's Clarisse Starling, but the comparison doesn't hold. Welsh doesn't have Lecter's calm and pointed clarity nor is Anna the willing student anxious to climb the ladder of success. Anna also lacks Clarisse's intuitive read on Welsh's character. Where Lecter is insightful and shares information that helps move things along, Welsh is frustrated and frustrating, using the interviews as mental masturbation. Welsh does help, but such help as could have been laid out in the first interview.

La Plante lacks the polished characterization used to such telling effect by Thomas Harris in Silence of the Lambs and loses her grip, much as Welsh loses his calm, superior demeanor when he discovers Anna is interested in another man. Welsh witnesses Anna with one of his guards, Ken Hudson, a buff blond guard studying to be a child psychologist.

Where La Plante fails to hit the mark is in the sudden intense relationship between Anna and Ken, moving from tentative first date to sex to marriage in less than three dates. Anna, who has always been obsessed with her work and is an orphan, is too anxious to move forward after her failed relationship with Langton, and jumps into sex and marriage with determined effort. The minor hitches along the way where Anna suspects Ken might be involved in the murder fail to ring true and look like attempts to throw a few roadblocks that never actually work. They are as quickly disposed of as is Anna's single-minded career track, coming off as desperation rather than head over heels love at first glance. It simply does not work.

Where La Plante excels is in detailing the minutiae of a murder investigation, going over and over the same ground mining for bits of information. Blind Fury is a template for how murder investigation are run and the time consuming work done by the officers--and the reader at times. The attention to detail does pay off as Anna gets the killer and finds out how all the murders are committed since the murderer is only too happy to lay out the details.

Blind Fury is less a thriller and more a police procedural, with the emphasis on the procedure. The relationships between co-workers and the main characters is less detailed and there is no ticking clock, although budgetary cuts are mentioned a couple of times. La Plante knows the turf and describes it well, providing an excellent manual on how to proceed in a cold case investigation. The human element takes a back seat to solving the murder and there Blind Fury succeeds beyond all expectations.

The dead speak

Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs

After five years of avoiding the show, I decided to find out what made the show Bones such a winner and how it had lasted for five years. I was not disappointed. I was, however, interested in learning more about the real life model for Temperance Brennan when I read the show was based on Kathy Reichs's detective novels told from the perspective of a forensic anthropologist, so I ordered Deja Dead and began reading as soon as it arrived.

I looked forward to seeing a crime solved from the bones of a case and to get a close-up view of the process of telling a person's life from the states of their skeletal remains. I got that and more than I had hoped in Kathy Reichs's novel. The details are chilling and exceptional, as they would be since Reichs is a working and accredited forensic anthropologist, and she is much more approachable and human than her television counterpart.

The writing has gritty and raw and hard-edged, but Reichs has a tendency to work too hard at creating metaphors, so hard that they often come off flat and intrusive. Where Reichs excels is not only in the details of forensic pathology, but in giving life to Tempe Brennan and her emotions. Brennan's attention to detail in her work and willingness to take chances in the field, even though she has no field training, makes her vulnerable and fascinating. It's also provides a base for a character arc that gives her plenty of room to grow.

In her drive to make Deja Dead more than just a police, or rather forensic, procedural, Reichs's execution does create some problems. In trying to write a hard-boiled novel with literary sensibilities, she is out of her depth most of the time, the writing constipated where it should be free flowing. She does, however, manage to pull of a one-two metaphoric punch that shows she, as well as Brennan, is learning and growing, or rather that she managed to get out of Brennan's way and let the character take the lead. One memorable example is when Brennan goes to a food stand to get a hot dog.

The guy behind the stand is a John Belushi look-alike. His clothes were damp and smelled of smoke and fat and a spice I didn't recognize. Droplets sparkled in his thick hair. When I glanced over he smiled at me, cocked one bushy eyebrow and ran his tongue slowly along his upper lip. He might as well have shown me his hemorrhoid.

Deja Dead is more than a forensic anthropologist's eye view of tracking and catching a serial killer. It is the first steps of a quickly maturing author who has an exacting eye for detail, a fine sense of theater and a growing grasp of what makes a story ring with truth when she lets the characters speak for themselves.

I much prefer Reichs's version of Brennan to Emily Deschanel's, but both have charms that make watching and reading them worth while.