Armed with visions and Paris chic, sleuths dig in
By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe March 25, 2007
Blind Spot
By Terri Persons
Doubleday, 337 pp., $23.95
Past Perfect
By Susan Isaacs
Scribner, 352 pp., $25
Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis
By Cara Black
Soho, 304 pp., $23
FBI agent Bernadette Saint Clare's nights are filled with disturbing dreams, and during the day she sees dead people . . . through the eyes of their killers. For the emotionally wounded protagonist of Terri Persons's debut novel, "Blind Spot," it's part of her job. Her former colleagues nicknamed her "Cat" -- after Catahoula leopard dogs , which, like Bernadette, have eyes of two different colors. I won't spoil the story behind those different-colored eyes (she wasn't born that way); let's just say Bernadette has a tormented history that includes a twin sister killed by a drunk driver and a husband who committed suicide.
When the book opens, Bernadette has just started a new assignment in St. Paul. She's had no time to unpack when she's called to a murder scene. A killer who takes his victims to a secluded spot, ties them up, tortures them, and severs a hand before killing them has struck for a second time. Her new boss, Tony Garcia, stands back, waiting for her to channel the killer, to do " the parlor trick. That spooky, ESP, bogeyman mumbo-jumbo." But Bernadette's careful observations (" that hand looks a tad riper than the body") , not second sight, bring investigators racing back to a crime scene they thought they'd finished processing.
There are occasional missteps when the story teeters on the edge of hokey -- for example, Bernadette has to bring an item that belongs to a murder victim to church and say a little prayer to conjure a vision. And I wish Persons hadn't pushed the "I see dead people" envelope quite as far as she did. But overall, this novel with its rapidly shifting viewpoints, unexpected plot twists, and engaging characters makes for a highly entertaining read. I have no crystal ball, but I hope Bernadette Saint Cla re will be seeing dead people for quite some time.
In Susan Isaacs's "Past Perfect," Katie Schottland writes a TV drama about spooks -- of the spy variety. Katie knows a thing or two about spies because she once worked for the CIA. Fired 10 years before under a cloud of uncertainty, she's persona non grata at the agency. Her fellow CIA operatives are forbidden to talk to her, so she's surprised when former colleague Lisa Golding calls, begging for help in alerting the media to a scoop of "national importance." When Katie balks -- she's a TV writer, not a journalist -- Lisa promises to reveal why Katie was fired from the CIA.
Katie, who thought she'd moved on with her life, trembles ("Well, my core was definitely shaking" ) at the prospect of at last discovering why she was unceremoniously dumped. She's even willing to tolerate an extended conversation with the annoying, squeaky-voiced Lisa, whom Katie remembers as a discerning shopper and a compulsive liar. Lisa promises to call back, but, as any regular reader of crime fiction will have anticipated, she disappears.
This very slender thread of motivation propels Katie into tracking down Lisa. The trail leads her to reconnect with her former lover and CIA boss, Ben Mattingly, and with a trio of East Germans whom Lisa relocated. Over and over, Katie replays her conversation with Lisa, and more than a hundred pages in she's still thinking: "The real question is how come her call had set me off the way it had." When she asks herself, for the umpteenth time, why she's still obsessing over losing her CIA job, this reader was thinking: Get over it already! The novel briefly takes off when Katie tracks down crusty former CIA operative Jacques Harlow and, in a few pages of genuinely funny, smart dialogue, it's apparent why this author's earlier books have done so well. But for the most part, this is a novel with buckets of attitude and introspection pushing precious little plot up a very steep hill.
A more successful melding of chick lit with crime fiction is Cara Black's "Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis." In this seventh series novel, computer security detective Aimée Leduc falls head over kitten heels in love with an infant. The baby's mother calls, begging Aimée for help, then abandons the newborn, wrapped in a bloodstained jacket, in a courtyard on the Ile Saint-Louis for Aimée to find. Aimée brings the baby back to her office, where her business partner, Rene Friant, a dwarf who favors Burberry raincoats and custom-made shoes, is smitten, too.
Soon Aimée is on a crusade to find the mother and to keep little Stella, as she calls the baby, out of harm's way. Meanwhile, Paris is roiled by environmental activists demonstrating against a soon-to-be-signed agreement between the government and a petroleum company notorious for pollution. A bomb is planted during what was supposed to be a peaceful march, and one of the environmental activists is murdered.
You've got to admire a thriller writer who saddles her story with a newborn and makes it work. With a heroine who doesn't flinch as the baby spits up all over her vintage Chanel and who barely slows down to change a diaper, Black takes the reader on a wild adventure through the sewers of Paris and into the rising waters of the Seine.
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