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never have dreamed of, while a killer strikes again and<br />
Davis is next on the murder list.<br />
Libby Fischer Hellmann, author of the awardwinning<br />
Ellie Forman series, uses this novel to spin-off<br />
Georgia Davis, a minor character in that series. Forman<br />
and her daughter Rachel return the favor, making a brief<br />
appearance here, as well. However, this tale is really<br />
Davis’s alone. Hellmann has created a considerably<br />
darker story here than in her earlier series. The author has<br />
matured over time as a writer, creating a substantially<br />
more complex plot for her protagonist to resolve. She has<br />
also taken the real life incident from a few years ago of high<br />
school senior girls hazing younger ones and let it run to the<br />
extreme result of the death of one of the unwilling<br />
participants.<br />
The weakness in the book, if indeed it is a<br />
weakness since it seems common in<br />
many private eye novels, is the constant<br />
questioning of witnesses who do not<br />
want to talk, with Davis getting little<br />
information out of them. Just chalk this<br />
up to the genre and do not let it get in<br />
the way of this otherwise fast-moving<br />
and entertaining story.<br />
This story is about much more<br />
than a simple murder. Hellmann examines<br />
the problems even rich young<br />
people think they face and what they<br />
do to achieve their own ends in the face<br />
of unloving and uncaring parents and<br />
so-called friends. She shows us the<br />
lengths that some people, adults as well<br />
as teenagers, will go to in order to<br />
accomplish their goals. Further, her<br />
characters, especially Davis, are well<br />
drawn, given both strengths and weaknesses<br />
to bring them to life. The author<br />
gets into the mindsets of these young<br />
women and their rationalizations for the courses in life they<br />
choose to take. Hellmann lives in the Chicago area, adding<br />
authenticity to the setting.<br />
This is a very different kind of mystery from<br />
Hellmann and she has succeeded very well at it.<br />
NAMELESS NIGHT by G. M. Ford ($23.95,<br />
William Morrow, February, 2008). Rating: B- About<br />
seven years before the story opens, a man is found in a<br />
railroad car, face horribly bashed in, but still alive. Mentally<br />
impaired and given the name Paul Hardy, he spends<br />
those years living in a group home for disabled adults until<br />
he is once again seriously injured, this time in an automobile<br />
accident. Following surgery Hardy regains many of his<br />
thought and speech processes, discovering that he can<br />
remember small glimpses of his life before he was found<br />
in the railroad car. As soon as the only name he can<br />
remember from the past is put into a computer search<br />
engine, some not very nice government agents (is there<br />
any other kind in these stories?) begin a violent nationwide<br />
search for him.<br />
Reviews<br />
<strong>Deadly</strong> <strong>Pleasures</strong><br />
41<br />
Okay, we’ve all seen this sort of story before. Man<br />
get amnesia, there’s some big horrible secret in his past,<br />
the government doesn’t want it known, so they try to hunt<br />
him down, all the while shouting “national security,” and he<br />
does his best to stay one step ahead of them even though<br />
he has no idea what is going on. That alone does not make<br />
it a bad story. It is what the author does with that basic tale<br />
that will make the difference between a solid, suspenseful<br />
tale and an average, predictable one. And G. M. Ford has<br />
come up with a pretty interesting tale of one man on the<br />
run from an unscrupulous government.<br />
For the most part Ford puts the reader into the<br />
shoes of his protagonist, telling us only what other information<br />
we might need to know to build the confusion felt by<br />
the man on the run. Why is he running? What does he<br />
know? What is so important that others around him are<br />
arrested (“national security” again) or<br />
dying? Ford slowly pulls back the layers,<br />
letting both Hardy and the reader in on<br />
the secrets that have lain hidden for<br />
years.<br />
Along the way the book has a lot<br />
of padding, with a number of what could<br />
be considered human-interest stories of<br />
people Hardy meets along the path to<br />
the return of his memory. This is sort of<br />
like the old Fugitive television series<br />
but in the case of this book it is like<br />
substantial padding that through a series<br />
of pretty unbelievable coincidences<br />
keeps Hardy pointed in the right direction.<br />
A little of that goes a long way and<br />
there is a lot of it here.<br />
Still the story moves along swiftly<br />
in spite of these many detours as the<br />
truth behind the conspiracy at the heart<br />
of the novel is revealed. In this day and<br />
age of conspiracy theories and paranoia<br />
about the enhanced “national security” powers of the<br />
government, this novel does not seem so far off the mark.<br />
THE GRAVING DOCK by Gabriel Cohen<br />
($23.95, Thomas Dunne Books /St. Martin’s Minotaur,<br />
November 2007). Rating: A It’s the frigid winter days<br />
of 2001 in the aftermath of the destruction of the World<br />
Trade Center. Brooklyn South Homicide Detective Jack<br />
Leightner is called upon to solve the death of a young boy<br />
whose body was found in a small coffin floating in a bay off<br />
New York Harbor. The dead boy has the letters “G.I.”<br />
“I believe it was Natasha Cooper who said that crime<br />
fiction writers deal with the dregs of society so, as a<br />
result, everyone they meet in real life is an absolute<br />
delight. Romance novelists, on the other hand, write<br />
about idealised characters and everyone they meet is<br />
a hideous disappointment.” Donna Moore
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