Patricia Cornwell, "The Scarpetta Factor": Too Much Angst and not Enough Action

The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia D. Cornwell

Back in 1985 Bobby Ewing was murdered on Dallas, but he was resurrected in a ham-handed “dream sequence” the next year; a television event that may rival the infamous “jump-the-shark” episode of Happy Days for small-screen hubris. Not to be outdone, author Patricia Cornwell left signature character Kay Scarpetta grieveing upon finding lover Benton Wesley’s engraved Breitling watch amidst the ashes of a bomb site in 1998’s Point of Origin; only to raise him from the dead five years later in Blow Fly. The reunited couple has since wed, moved to the northeast, and set up multiple psychiatric and pathology practices in Boston and New York… a real shuttle family. And yes, Lucy and Marino have tagged along, though Marino can only afford housing in NYC, and lacks a squat in Beantown. Scarpetta's billionaire niece Lucy can, of course, afford both…

To keep busy while Ben (or is it Wes? I never remember) toils at the McLean Institute; the Doc, as Marino calls Scarpetta, does pro bono autopsies for the NYC medical examiner and picks up pocket change as a forensics consultant to CNN. Guess that latter’s how the couple affords both a home in Boston and a pied-à-terre on Central Park West. Though the latest media sensation in the Big Apple is the disappearance of money maven Hannah Starr three weeks ago, Scarpetta’s not on that case – instead, she’s on the case of a young jogger whose body was discovered in the Park. There’s no reason to think there’s any connection, but during Scarpetta’s next appearance on CNN the host tries to get her to connect dead woman to missing woman, going so far as to claim that both had been seen “getting into a yellow cab.” Gee, I thought everybody in Manhattan rode in cabs all the time…

Wes… errr, Benton has his own problems, involving an “inappropriate” Christmas card from a recently discharged patient at McLean. Something about this woman sets his teeth on edge – though it’s difficult to figure out what could ruffle the preternaturally calm shrink and former FBI wunderkind. That is, of course, before the bomb shows up on their doorstep. All of which kicks Marino, Lucy, Lucy’s squeeze Jaime Berger (ADA in charge of sex crimes [ain’t that Linda Fairstein’s job?]), and a host of cop-types into high gear. A missing BlackBerry and a deteriorating relationship between Lucy and Jaime add to the fun.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet – if you thought Benton’s (did I get the name right) resurrection was something, The Scarpetta Factor is gonna set you on your ear.

Somewhere about 1998, the Kay Scarpetta series went off the rails. Instead of being about a ferociously intelligent woman who uses her skills and intellect to solve crimes, the series morphed into something about relationships – dysfunctional relationships. First there was Scarpetta’s niece Lucy, the supercali-technologic-XP-all-precocious young lesbian: her coming out, her violence, her tendency to be completely uncontrollable and just abour as antisocial. Then there was the whole Wesley thing, with his “death” and reappearance. Then there was the Marino thing - a drunken attempt to “hook up” with Scarpetta. There were all the moves - Virginia to South Carolina to Florida to Bos/NYC – and Scarpetta’s career changes. Oh, and the whole wolfman Chandonne thing, too…

Recently, it looked as though author Patricia Cornwell had pulled the series out of its funk, especially in the last installment – simply named Scarpetta. In the seventeenth book of this venerable series, however, Cornwell backslides something fierce. Of the nearly 500 pages of The Scarpetta Factor (a hefty tome), much more than half is given over to the characters’ analysis of their feelings, fears, hopes, desires, memories… There are soliloquies on what kind of tomato Scarpetta should slice up for a 3:00 AM salad to make herself feel better about the bomb squad’s leaving fingerprints on her glass sculpture. There are extended – and I mean several pages – renderings of Lucy’s barely-contained rage at what she considers a slight by an FBO air-traffic controller. There is page after page of Marino and Wesley in their ongoing pissing contest. It’s rather boring, in fact.

Yes, the pieces of a good mystery are all there: Marino has his cop moments; Scarpetta is a pathology goddess in scrubs and a hair net. Lucy has better computers (and more smarts) than NSA signals intelligence, and knows how to use them. But Lord! There is so much misdirection and so much sniveling going on in here that its removal would have cut the book in half and still left the plot intact.

Last time out, I thought Scarpetta was back: sadly, it appears I was wrong.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road": Now, Tomorrow, and For Ever More

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

In some not so distant future the unnamed man and boy shamble slowly across a bleak, ashen landscape, headed toward the shore of an unnamed sea. They are two of the last survivors, a pair of dying souls making slow progress across the face of a world already dead. They're following The Road down its winding path, passing desiccated village, burnt-out city, and dilapidated farmstead. The leaden sky is empty of birds; the cold, mucky gray water supports no fish; no animals prowl among the blackened stumps of the forest alongside their route. The few humans still alive forage for scraps of preserved food among the ruins or, worse, commit that unthinkable act so familiar to the last survivors of disaster.

In some other, brighter time, the man had had a wife, a home, a career. Now he has but a pistol with two bullets, a shopping cart, a few tattered blankets, and a plastic tarp to keep the ever-falling ashen snow from soaking through their few meager supplies. The boy, a child of indeterminate age, was born as the cataclysm that destroyed their world struck; his mother is long gone, dead by her own hand after uttering her own epitaph: "We're the walking dead in a horror film."

In this post-apocalyptic world there is no color left; only black, white, and an all-encompassing gray. There's little left for a father to teach his son: there will be no more games of catch, no more pop-up storybooks, no more hours whiled away on fishing trips. All that remains is survival, and the boy's grim, oft-repeated question: "We're the good guys, right?"

Maybe.

From the pen of Cormac McCarthy (the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men) and soon to appear in theaters, The Road set a new standard for the author's often grim worldview. In his chilling saga of life amidst the ruins of our civilization, McCarthy has envisioned a future so bleak, so dismal, that to have given his characters names would have endowed them with too much humanity to bear. Instead, a nameless pair treks slowly through a blasted, ashen future world, their dragging steps lit sporadically by lightning flashes by night and rare glimpses of a wan sun behind billowing clouds of ash by day. "The nights now only slightly less black, by day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

McCarthy's prose is beyond spare in The Road: his words have been stripped to bare essentials, their spare form a conscious parallel to the starvation diet upon which his characters subsist. Like the blighted world in which it's set, the book itself is nearly depopulated. The few characters are reduced to mere skeletal remnants in more than merely the physical sense; their sole surviving emotions a guttering orange flame of will to live and the white hot light of fear. For father and son alone, there is one other emotion: filial love; the pair's only constant in a forgotten and forgettable world. The power of that bond between father and son will overcome fear; overcome sorrow – it is what makes them the good guys.

McCarthy's bleak vision may serve as a prediction; it may serve as a warning. It will most certainly serve to incite contemplation.

If Ron Paul Wrote Science Fiction: “The Unincorporated Man”

The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin

Justin Cord awoke after a nap that put Rip Van Winkle to shame; awoke looking upon an angel. In fact, Neela Harper wasn’t an angel: she was a reanimation specialist. A lot happened in the three centuries since Justin Cord had crawled into a secret cryogenic suspension unit and staged his disappearance. He woke to an entirely different society: not long after he went under, the world economy collapsed and society followed close behind. The center of American society became Alaska, and the hardy self-sufficient types who populated the last frontier had some interesting ideas about how things should run. In short, every human being is now a personal corporation – all forty billion of ‘em, from Mercury to the Oort Cloud. At birth, each person accrues 100,000 shares of stock in himself. Five thousand belong to the government, 20K belong to the parents, and the remainder get used to feed, clothe, house, and educate the child. Once of legal age, the citizen takes possession of whatever stock remains. A system-wide stock exchange allows every citizen to trade in the shares of every other citizen – including oneself. The ultimate goal is to buy enough of your own stock to become the majority holder, which – in theory – allows you to do pretty much what you want. If you have special talents or skills, your stock becomes more expensive; same thing if you get a good job or become famous – even if it’s just for being famous, like Paris or Nicole.

Justin Cord, however, is a “new” breed of citizen: no one owns a single share of Justin Cord, and he also refuses to own a share of any person. For that stand on principal, Cord earns the undying enmity of the world’s most powerful corporation, CGI, in general; and CGI’s corporate hatchet man Hektor Sambianco in specific. Why the fear and loathing? To CGI and Hektor, Justin Cord – the “one free man” – represents the greatest threat in history to their economic and social system. On that basis alone, Cord must be neutralized: either forced to incorporate, or just plain terminated; either one would be fine. CGI is up against a formidable foe, however: Justin Cord has already had one lifetime of experience fending off financial and legal attacks – but he’s also in a world in which everyone has had a lifetime of experience in high finance. Can Cord remain The Unincorporated Man? Stay tuned…

Speculative fiction can be especially difficult to write successfully: not only must the author fulfill his audience’s expectation of solid plot and believable characters, those readers also expect a future that’s a logical outgrowth of current trends. That probably explains the plethora of post-apocalyptic fiction during the Cold War era; the predictions of rampant sea-level rise in more current scifi. Readers cut authors slack on those predictions by way of a process called the willing suspension of disbelief. Even when we can’t quite accept an author’s vision, we’re still willing to adhere to the polite fiction that all things are possible – as long as everything hangs together in a coherent whole. An author who struggles to make his future fit that convention is an author who has failed his readers.

SoCal brothers Eytan and Dani Kollin base their first joint novel (the latter’s website cites three prior YA novels) on a single change that sweeps society, uniting every human under a single socioeconomic system; the system of personal incorporation. The brothers take particular pleasure in explaining how their prediction of a sort of hypercapitalism is the best of all possible worlds, alternating between paeans to the perfection of the market and the evils of any government larger than the brain of a brontosaurus. The system government’s only purpose is to let contracts to private companies for the largest possible projects – terraforming the other planets of the Solar System and developing interstellar travel, for instance. Any other functions handled by present-day governments – education, the justice system, transportation – are “better” handled by private corporations in the Kollins’ future.

There is no argument that the Kollin brothers have postulated a future that, while unlikely, could occur under certain circumstances (this reader finds it both amusing and slightly chilling that the father of the personal incorporation movement was a “minor elected official from Alaska…”). That duty of the scifi writer has been satisfied – though the “universe” of personal incorporation has some obvious flaws that the writers either ignore or overlook; that's what "willling suspension of disbelief" is for. On the other two responsibilities of the author, the brothers meet with less success. The arc of the plot resembles a poorly-rigged tightrope: it seems taut at both ends, but sags badly in the middle. In the case of The Unincorporated Man, this is because vast chunks of the novel’s central third are riddled with gratuitous expository passages, presumably intended to laud the libertarian premises that underlie the fictional universe. Only a few minor characters are particularly likeable; and the major characters are so heavily stereotyped that they should be wearing Kabuki makeup. The writing is often clumsy; and the novel suffers from editing lapses, dangling plot threads, routine visits from the Coincidence Fairy, and a scattering of continuity problems. It ain’t gonna win awards from the proofreaders.

It’s unusual, but not unheard-of, for a work of fiction to thinly disguise proselytization for a political position. A recent example of such a work was the late Michael Crichton’s heavy-handed State of Fear. The Unincorporated Man, however, takes the practice to extremes. Going beyond Crichton's rather genteel partisanship, however; the Kollin brothers take their lead from AM radio: that which is not part of their philosophy deserves no respect, and must instead be mocked. That means tht the government is ineffective by definition. The “tax man” has become an evil demon; who might as well have a big knife and a hook, and spend his nights lurking on lovers’ lane. Government courts need to ask for help from the private sector because they can’t afford anyone who isn’t simply mediocre. Oh, yes, the future universe is a capitalist paradise.

Yet there are still serpents in that paradise: the system’s most powerful corporate boardroom looks like an episode of “The Apprentice,” for instance; and the excesses of that same corporation (CGI) are every bit as repugnant as anything a democratic government has done (we’re not talking Idi Amin’s Uganda here…) – bribery is routine and murders are contracted with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge. And if you’ve read this far and don’t mind a spoiler, by the end of the novel the characters suggest that incorporation is akin to slavery, and that anarchy would be preferable…

The Kollin brothers have written what amounts to a white paper for the Libertarian Party of the 24th Century – so be it. But don’t be fooled by all the accolades heaped on The Unincorporated Man by “fellow travelers.” Five hundred pages in defense of a futuristic libertopia notwithstanding, at its core the novel remains a work of science fiction: and it’s really not all that good.

The Unincorporated Man - $8.99
from: RedShelf

Marcus Sakey, "The Amateurs": This is a Job for Professionals

The Amateurs by Marcus Sakey

Imagine that you’re thirty-something, stuck in a dead-end job, and not one of the lofty dreams of youth has come true. If someone came to you and proposed a scheme that could change your life, what would your answer be? Even if it meant breaking the law? The Thursday Night Drinking Club answered, “Yes.”

The Club is Alex, a bartender; Mitch, invisible doorman at a swanky hotel; Jenn, a travel agent (do they even still have those in the era of the internet?); and Ian, the club’s one semi-success – a trader who hasn’t grabbed the brass ring in years. Every Thursday the friends meet at the restaurant where Alex tends bar; meet perhaps mostly because misery loves company. Their favorite drinking game is one they call “Ready-Go”; basically a form of “what if?” When one night Alex’s question is, “What would you do if you had a share of a quarter-million dollars?” the question is more pertinent than most: Alex knows where there is a quarter mil just ready to be picked up. The problem is that to get the money, the four will have to steal it. That should be no problem: they’re smarter than the average crook, after all. And so a pact is made, a foolproof plan is formed, and the Thursday Night Drinking Club set themselves up to embark on a life of crime.

Bobbie Burns was right: even the best-laid plans often go awry.

Everything begins according to plan, but then things begin to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, but horribly wrong – and a man lying dead in the alley behind the restaurant isn’t even the worst of their problems. You see, the friends may be smart, but they are definitely amateurs and they make an amateur mistake: they don’t realize who they’re dealing with. And the four are dealing with people who are a lot, lot worse then they’d ever expected…

Chicago author Marcus Sakey seems to be building a literary career out of “what if” scenarios himself. The Amateurs begins slowly, seeming at first glance little more than a by-the-numbers thriller with the quartet of amateur crooks caught in the inevitable squeeze between the cops investigating a crime and real crooks wanting their booty back. If that were the case, the plot of The Amateurs would play out with but slight differences from Sakey’s previous novel, Good People. That was, in fact, my first impression of the novel. In the earlier tale, however, Tom and Anna Reed (the titular “good” people) find themselves forced to make tough decisions that will affect their lives. The four friends in The Amateurs find themselves in much, much deeper doodoo. What the four of them do, what the four of them decide, will affect their lives and the lives of those they love – and that’s only for starters: what the four of them finally do, what the four of them finally decide, will effect millions of lives.

In that, Marcus Sakey has raised his new novel far beyond some simple by-the-numbers thriller – not that The Amateurs isn’t a first-rate thriller, because it certainly is. More than just write a crime novel, however, Sakey has crafted a study into the psychology of how ordinary people react under extraordinary circumstances. The Amateurs goes even further: it is ultimately a study of how a seemingly ordinary person can give his life meaning.

"How to Rob an Armored Car": How Not to Succeed In Business WIthout Really Trying

How to Rob an Armored Car  by Iain Levison

Welcome to Slacker City, PA, population three – average age (and average annual salary) twenty-something. The local slackers - Kevin (ex-con turned professional dog-walker), Doug (English major turned food-service worker), and Mitch (nothing much turned auto parts manager at Accu-Mart) – certainly seem friendly enough, though their affability might well be because the three are constantly stoned. Mitch and Doug live a life of glorious underachievement, with their grody apartment and beater rides. Kevin’s life is a little more interesting, since his wife’s job helps pay for the slightly larger house the family of three needs and a slightly newer truck; but the marriage was never all that solid and it seems to be getting shakier (ask Doug why, eh?). The slacker lifestyle becomes more appropriate after first Mitch and then Doug lose their jobs in quick succession; but at least Mitch’s exit doesn’t come before he can arrange for an $1800 flat-screen to “fall off a truck” into Kevin’s pickup at the Accu-Mart loading dock. Flushed with pride at the easy success of their first foray into grand larceny – not to mention intrigued by the apparent lack of effort – the trio determine that their destiny is to become master criminals.

Jobs having gotten scarce as hen's teeth in the dying rust-belt town of Wilton, the friends end up dividing their time between plotting their next caper – a caper that never quite seems to go right – and regularly refilling the house bong with weed - job searches can go hang. Whether it’s dealing pills for a shady MD; a steal-to-order Ferrari; or the ultimate caper, robbing an armored car; the three wannabe gangsters quickly prove that they’re a twenty-first century edition of The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (except that these three don’t shoot at all). The trio prove remarkably lucky, though: their victims can’t shoot straight, either.

If you ever need to know how to knock over an armored car, talk to Howard C. A high school classmate of mine, Howard knocked over a Brinks truck just a couple of years after we graduated. Of course, Howard managed to knock it over by T-boning the truck with his semi at a busy intersection, as opposed to cold-cocking a guard and making off with bags of cash at gunpoint; but it still makes for a good story. On the other hand, Iain Levison’s literary version of his three slackers’ similar feat – How to Rob an Armored Car – turns out to be somewhat less interesting. Perhaps it’s the overstudied aimlessness of his characters that makes Levison’s plot uninteresting; perhaps it’s the by-rote stupidity of every one of their criminal plots that does the deed. Then again, it might be just how hard Levinson struggles to make his characters maximally slack. Whatever the cause, it doesn’t quite work for this reader. Lacking much of a plot, How to Rob and Armored Car still manages to be moderately entertaining, mostly because of some fairly stock gags and a couple of cute twists. It’s readable – but I wouldn’t put it on the top of the stack. (Confidential to Levison: those who speak English with Hispanic accents don’t pronounce Mitch “Meesh” – that’d be French.)

Thrice before an author (Dog Eats Dog, Since the Layoffs, and A Working Stiff’s Manifesto), Iain Levison seems determined to carve out a niche for himself writing about aimless stoners too lazy to get off the couch to repack the bowl on the bong. Someone ought to warn him that embers of his chosen demographic aren’t real big on reading novels…

An earlier, slightly different version copyright ©2009 for curled-up.com by Rex Allen