Library Limelights 232

 

Brad Parks. The Last Act. 2019. Ebook, download from TPL’s Overdrive by Libby. Originally published by Dutton Books, 2019.

Tommy Jump was a successful Broadway star in his youth, but now in his late twenties, he’s pretty much a has-been scrambling for stage parts in regional productions. His ever-tolerant girlfriend Amanda is a talented artist without major recognition or income. They live like church mice and then Amanda gets pregnant. Deus ex machina needed, of course, arriving in the form of two FBI agents: Danny happens to be a childhood friend; Rick is the stern, humourless one. Wouldn’t Tommy like to go to minimum-security prison for six months on a mission for them? They will pay him hundreds of thousand dollars to discover the location of hidden documents detailing the money-laundering scheme of the New Colima Mexican drug cartel. Legitimate prisoner and ex-banker Mitch Dupree was the brains behind it, the man Tommy should befriend. Tommy is warned that every man in prison will lie to him, that he can’t trust anyone.

So, a fully credible fictional ID makes Tommy into Pete Goodrich, former high school history teacher, and indicted bank robber. No question, his most demanding role ever. Amanda is in on the secret, so is Tommy’s mom Barb; they live together while waiting for Tommy to be successful. Some time goes by in prison before he can manufacture a complicated opportunity to get close to Mitch. Told mainly from Tommy/Pete’s POV, we get glimpses of Amanda’s activities, as well as how Mitch’s wife Natalie is faring. The brief digressions also include the sinister movements of Herrera, security chief for the vicious El Vio, head of the cartel. They are prepared to torture and kill anyone or everyone to prevent disclosure of the documents that could doom them to extradition and certain American justice. Natalie, Amanda, and many others could become collateral damage. The plot is diabolically clever; Tommy’s wits have to keep him alive through more than one double-crossing. Non-stop action and surprises!

Teasers

▪ He was at least three time zones removed from whatever preconceived notions I had about an FBI agent. (26)

▪ “Everyone on-site is what we call operationally dark.” (78)

▪ He reached out his hand which was the size of a hubcap and, when I shook it, at least as hard. (182)

▪ He joined the cartel because he wanted the action. Because he loved the things that could happen in the dark. (249)

▪ And then he said the last words I wanted to hear: “I saw you in a play once. It was about tomatoes, if you can believe that.” (281)

▪ I shoved my hands in my pockets and began whistling, like a man without a care in the world, all the while lobbing prayers into the universe. (302)

▪ And it was difficult to square the man contentedly munching cookies, talking about how much he loved family road trips, with a guy who could do the bidding of one of the most barbaric criminal syndicates on earth. (336)

▪ Those documents had to be somewhere. In a lean-to. A shack. A tree house. A hole in the ground. Somewhere. (362)

▪ “The warden sent me to get you. Two FBI agents are here.” (477)

▪ Neither Mitch nor I would be wearing a wire—it was too risky, we all agreed―but the FBI had already planted enough listening devices nearby that a cricket wouldn’t be able to fart without them hearing it. (536)

▪ It turns out applause can actually be more fulfilling when it’s for someone else. (575)

Rebecca Fleet. The Second Wife. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2020.

Alex marries Natalie a few years after his first wife died. His daughter Jade and Natalie get along, if not a warm maternal relationship. Alex is not at home when a late night fire races through their house; firemen find fourteen-year-old Jade, sending her to hospital, but Natalie escaped with less damage. Jade says an intruder was in the house beforehand; Natalie disagrees. Alex finds himself suspicious. Who on earth would try to burn his house down? Why couldn’t Natalie find Jade and rescue her? Could Natalie be cheating on him? The narrative has been switching between wife and husband, protecting Jade being Alex’s main concern. Natalie is worried about being watched and followed, finally and reluctantly disclosing bits of her past life to Alex—her real name is Rachel. This could be a witness-protection program gone wrong. Her hesitation in providing details compels Alex to plunge blindly into unknown situations for clear answers.

Rachel and Sadie were sisters living in London, sisters who followed different paths. We hear from each sister taking turns. Rachel was the quiet, responsible one with a job. Sadie’s wild obsession with nightclub owner Kas (Kaspar) led her over the criminal edge. Events for Sadie—a sociopath, if not a psychopath―were exciting and dangerous, yet there’s an odd passivity in relating them. Ultimately Sadie and Kas were tried, convicted, and imprisoned on murder counts. It was Rachel’s loath testimony that sealed their fate, hence her placement in witness protection (I wonder why a cross-examination of her in court is not addressed). Alex is gobsmacked by this new information, both of them fearing retribution against Rachel and all she loves in her new life. But Alex himself has been playing a secret game. The action does gear up in the end. It’s a decent thriller but suspension of disbelief is strained in the finer details.

Natalie

▪ “I stayed in there as long as I could but I knew I had to get out or I was going to die.” (13)

▪ Alex pushes back his chair and glares at me. “I’m trying to protect my family, Natalie. You and Jade. How can I do that if I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going on? I needed answers that you weren’t giving me.” (188)

▪ Is this what I fucking signed up for? (277)

Alex

▪ I keep seeing Jade, lying there in the intensive care unit—doctors swarming around her, machines flashing and whirring. (8)

▪ I don’t know who this man is, but I don’t trust him. And I don’t want his picture in my wife’s handbag. (47)

▪ I don’t think I’ve ever looked at my wife before and known that she’s lying to me. (131-2)

▪ The chat box pops up, her words brief and inviting. Come to play? (169)

▪ I have no way of judging the real level of any threat to us. (247)

Rachel

▪ Slowly, she grows to understand that Kas is at the center of a network that does not advertise itself. Like a set of concentric circles, some are allowed into his inner force field, and others are kept at the fringes. (82)

▪ But I’m not like most people. I’m not afraid of the worst things, and I know that if you want something enough, then you need to make it happen. (278)

Sadie

▪ She’s a heartbeat away from toppling down into that dark sense of dread, the one that sometimes waits for her around the corner and sinks its teeth in when she least expects it. (69)

▪ He is so close that she can smell his aftershave, the spicy cinnamon scent of it crawling over her like smoke. (73)

▪ The disappointment in her sister’s eyes is numbing her, just another layer of chilly insulation around her heart. (105)

Kas

▪ “These things are so insignificant to me now,” he says quietly. “What is done is done. Your wife is nothing to me anymore.” (2

Alex ponders:

I have the sense that I’m straying too far into something I don’t understand, but the old adage flashes into my mind: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. That’s what I’m doing here—getting closer, trying to put myself in the way of anyone who might want to destroy what I’ve got left. I tell myself this, and try to ignore another peculiarly apt little phrase—that if you’re playing with fire, you run the risk of getting burned. (171-2)

Rachel’s new ID transformation:

She takes the glasses the woman is handing her and puts them on, but there is no change in her vision. Clear glass, she thinks. The glasses give her an air of alertness, they make her raise her chin and square her shoulders. She has the strangest sense that this woman both is and is not herself. Something is stirring inside her; the knowledge that this process is going further and cutting deeper than she imagined. This change is more than exterior: she can feel it spreading under the skin, uncomfortably mingling with everything she has always known. She is neither one person nor the other. She is weightless, no more than a concept. She does not know, yet, who she will turn out to be. (236)

Alex’s Internet shame:

I’m uncomfortably aware of the hypocrisy in what I’m saying. I can’t help thinking of secretroom, and my interactions with Cali. Distasteful though the thought is, she, too, could be anyone: a precocious schoolgirl, a fat fifty-year-old trucker. But of course there’s a world of difference between fantasy and reality, and for Jade this definitely seems to be moving into the latter. (245)

B.A. Paris. The Breakdown. Ebook download from TPL. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2017.

Breakdown can refer to car trouble on a lonely backroad at night in a fierce storm; that’s what happened to a young woman found murdered in her car the next morning. The victim, Jane, was known to and liked by our narrator Cass, a local school teacher. In fact, Cass had driven past Jane’s stationary car that night without offering help if it was needed; the woman’s face as it turned was unrecognizable through the pounding rain. Cass justifies her non-action in that no sign of distress was shown, and the woman likely had phoned for help already. Next day when they hear the chilling news, Cass can’t tell her husband Matthew her experience because he’d forbidden her to drive that unsafe road at night (nothing elsewhere indicates that Matthew intimidated her by being temperamental or abusive).

The rest of the book is pretty much guilt. Cass’s guilt: that she drove against Matthew’s dictum for her own safety; that if she had approached the unmoving car to enquire, Jane might still be alive; that she’s withholding information from Matthew and the police; that Jane has left motherless twin tots. Cass’s issue of avoidance unleashes a major chain of trauma and if you believe a woman can so fear her husband’s possible reaction to going against his wishes, then this book is for you.

Breakdown also refers to the mental deterioration Cass undergoes. She’s convinced the murderer, yet uncaught, believes that she saw him on that dark night and is biding his time to kill her too. Silent, anonymous phone calls are plaguing her, but at first Matthew doesn’t believe they occur. To top it off, she feels her increasing forgetfulness is leading her down her mother’s path of dementia. The story ends without showing us the climactic effect on a principal player. The end is actually a long exposition; it doesn’t make me want to choose another B.A. Paris novel. It seems I’ve had too many of these lately—little action, little dialogue, overabundance of repetitive agonizing.

Teasers?

▪ I try to calm myself but I feel under siege, not only from the elements but also from the trees as they writhe back and forth in a macabre dance ready to pluck my little car from the road and toss it into the storm at any moment. (12)

▪ “He thinks it won’t be the last murder around here.” (67)

▪ Jane may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but so was I. So was I. (115)

▪ I spend most of my days drifting between wake and sleep, sprawled on the sofa, the television switched to the shopping channel because I can’t summon the energy to change it. (243)

▪ It’s the guilt and fear that have riddled my every waking moment since I drove past Jane’s car two months ago. It’s guilt and fear that have diminished me. (277)

▪ “You’re ill, Cass, you have early-onset dementia and you’re paranoid. Can’t you just accept it?” (297)

▪ It feels as if everything’s crumbling around me and I don’t know who to trust, not even myself. (333)