Why Read "The Spire"? It's Pointless...

The Spire by Richard North Patterson

Sixteen years ago as a senior (and one of the B-est of MOCs) at Caldwell University, Mark Darrow stumbled off fraternity row early one Sunday morning, only to find the body of a young African-American classmate lying in the shadow of Caldwell's iconic landmark, The Spire. The uproar over the death of one of the school's few minority students (not to mention a beautiful young woman) and the conviction of a second student - one of Darrow's closest friends - knocked the legs out from under the tiny college's fundraising efforts, and it'd been downhill ever since. Darrow's career, on the other hand, had moved in the opposite direction: after Yale Law, his rise in the ranks of attorneys was positively meteoric until, at forty, the handsome young man was a millionaire many times over. That's when his Caldwell mentor and the closest thing to a father he'd ever had, Lionel Farr, came calling in his Beantown highrise office with a proposition. Since the current president of Caldwell had just been caught with his hand in the till (to the tune of $900K), would Darrow please quit his law practice and take over for him?

Well, of course he would...

Back in Wayne, Ohio (home of Caldwell), Darrow found his alma mater clearly on the skids, with morale among both alumni and faculty tanked. Since that long-ago murder started Caldwell on a long, slow decline, Darrow found the case weighed heavily on his mind. Though snowed under with his presidential duties , Darrow nonetheless found time to investigate Angela Hall's murder - especially when he realized that, in hindsight, some things had never added up. To make his nights even shorter, Darrow also embarked on a personal investigation of the alleged embezzlement by his predecessor. Juggling not just a job and a new-found "hobby" would be plenty for a normal man, but Mark Darrow's not your ordinary man: there was also a certain young woman he hadn't seen in sixteen years.

Did the wrong man go to jail for life? Where's the missing money (and who made it go missing)? Could Mark Darrow turn Caldwell around in spite of having zero experience running a university? Would the young widower's broken heart be mended by a raven-haired beauty? All the answers will be found near the center of the Caldwell campus, at The Spire.

Richard North Patterson's seventeenth novel (and second for 2009), The Spire isn't a novel of political intrigue (The Race or Balance of Power), nor is it a courtroom drama (Dark Lady), nor an "issue" piece like Exile or Eclipse): Patterson has written what may well be the first (and very likely the last) mystery with a university president as protagonist. In creating his fictitious Caldwell, Patterson draws heavily on his undergrad days at Ohio Wesleyan University, though the real place seems to have no "spire" at the center of campus - that would be the University of Texas...

Although the plot of a white-shoe Boston attorney turned university president trying to solve two different crimes (one more than a decade old) bears no resemblance to anything else in Patterson's oeuvre, the novel remains immediately recognizable as his work. As in both Exile and Eclipse, the protagonist is a single male legal eagle called to help an important person from his past; about to re-encounter a woman he'd left behind. 

Some might think that the dynamics of small-town race relations and the friction between "town and gown" in small university towns are issue enough for Patterson in The Spire, though I would disagree. Neither such stress is covered in any particular detail, and race relations are actually glossed over except to say that "some people were racist back in the old days." In the absence of a great question to discuss and about which his characters might wax philosophical (endlessly...), Patterson's latest is decidedly smaller that most of his recent works. It's not much smaller physically, but it's smaller intellectually. Where protagonists in his "large-scale" novels are world-class experts working at the leading edges of their vocation (the law), Darrow seems somehow able to have leapt into an entirely new job and still have time to investigate not one but two crimes - and have hot monkey sex with a beautiful woman in his day. Oh, to be young again, eh? Or perhaps it's the Perry Mason effect - lawyers are all supernatural beings.

Besides a plodding and pedestrian plot, The Spire also suffers from a surfeit of transparency. That both of Darrow's investigations would result in miscarriages of justice uncovered was, per convention, a given from page one. What is worse, however, is that the true villain of the piece, regardless of Patterson's clumsy attempts at misdirection, is as obvious as an NBA center amongst a tribe of pygmies. What a generous reviewer might call a "huge plot twist" came as no surprise whatsoever for this reader. Last, Patterson never laid any groundwork for Darrow's decision to leave a highly lucrative legal career and become president of a tiny college - while barely in his forties. Such shortcomings do precious little to recommend The Spire as a mystery/thriller novel - and I don't recommend it, either.