Deadline & Gathering Prey

Enjoyable Crime Capers

Lucas Davenport is Virgil Flowers’s boss. John Sandford has given both their own series of books, and the two make guest appearances in each other’s stories. That’s the reason for writing about two books by the same author, Gathering Prey starring Davenport (the latest in the Prey series) and Deadline with Flowers.

They are both crime fighters—Davenport is a family man (after philandering through many early Prey novels) of independent means, and a penchant for fashionable designer clothes; a maverick for whom him his job is a passion. Flowers is a roughneck with multiples marriages behind him and is currently in a happy relationship with a woman who has many children by different fathers. Both books are hugely entertaining, the Flowers’ one more so, because of the crackling dialogue—the exchanges between Flowers and his buddy Johnson Johnson (same first and last name) are hilarious.

 

Virgil Flowers is a tall guy with blond hair, dressed in jeans and vintage band T-shirts, with a sharp mind and a laidback air.  He is awakened at an inconvenient hour by a call from his buddy Johnson, reporting the theft of his friend’s dogs.  It is one of a series of dognappings in bucolic Trippton, which has upset the people of the town, who think of their canines as family.

When Flowers lands up to help Johnson and his friends as a favour, he hopes to get time to go fishing, but the seemingly peaceful town is seething with crime.  Without meaning to look under the rocks, Flowers finds a drug gang cooking meth in the hills, and a local journalist is found dead with bullets in his back.“You got a colorful town here,” he observes to the locals who want to form a posse and hunt down the dog snatchers (who sell their beloved pets for medical research).

In the very first chapter, the reader knows who stole the dogs; it is also revealed that the members of the local school board had the journalist killed, because he was about to reveal their financial scams. The fun is in keeping up with Flowers’s investigations and seeing how he solves all the crimes and ties up loose ends with a neat bow.

Up in the hills, Virgil befriends a street smart 12-year-old, rifle-toting kid called Muffy (he deserves a series of his own), who sees more than is good for him, and finds a feisty old lady as well as a young woman described as the “town prostitute” more than willing to give him the information he seeks. Lucas Davenport does his boss duty on the phone. The body count rises, and leads to an action-packed climax.

Deadline is the eighth book in the Virgil Flowers series, written with obvious relish and affection for the many lowlifes of small town Minnesota. John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, who, as a journalist won the Pulitzer Prize 1986 for a series of stories titled Life on the Land: An American Farm Family. He is the author of 35 novels and two nonfiction books many of them bestsellers—it’s not hard to see why.

Deadline

by John Sandford

Published by Putnam

Pages: 388

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In Deadline, Virgil Flowers describes his boss, Lucas Davenport, as “not a bad guy, though a trifle intense.”

Davenport who works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (beat that CID!) that keeps him more than busy. He loves dressing, and drives swish cars, obviously not paid for by his cop’s salary.Gathering Prey is Sandford’s 25^th Prey novel and from all accounts among the better ones.

His life is chugging along with routine crime when his adopted daughter Letty comes to him for help with two Traveler she has made friends with. Travelers are bands of people who live like gypsies, always on the move and making a little money busking, petty crime or dope-peddling.

A young woman, Skye, has called Letty in a panic to tell her about the disappearance of her boyfriend, Henry. She believes that a psycho called Pilate may have killed Henry. Pilate is a maniac who travels around with a band of ‘disciples’ who torture and kill people for fun—mostly homeless people, whose deaths nobody cares about.

Lucas and Letty launch a search for Pilate as they discover that he is a killer of the notorious Charles Manson variety.  The chase involves cops from many towns and precincts—Virgil Flowers included--as Pilate and his gang hang around Juggalo Gatherings—Juggaloes being fans of the hip hop music group Insane Clown Posse, and wear clown make-up at their music meets called Gatherings in various towns across America.

Pilate is smart, deadly and one step ahead of the cops—he kills without a qualm and hold his followers in a tight grip. It turns out that his girlfriend Kristen has more spunk than he does, but the breathless chase takes Lucas and Letty from one town to another, endangering their own lives to prevent more brutal murders.  The pre-climactic shootout is like an edge-of-the seat scene in a film, so vividly does Sandford describe the landscape and the people caught in Pilate’s web. Twenty-five books in the series and still going strong…

Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

Published by Putnam 

Pages: 416

Memory Man

Never to Forget

David Baldacci is a very prolific writer of thrillers, and his latest, Memory Man, is not just an absorbing read, it also introduces the Amos Decker series.

How is Amos Decker different from other fictional detective heroes?  He never forgets anything—which can be a blessing and a curse. Years earlier, as a young football player, he had been blindsided in his first game and got hit on the head so violently that he was declared dead. When he was revived, something had happened inside his brain that made him “an acquired savant with hyperthymesia and synesthesia abilities.”  Which in simple terms means he has total recall.

After he recovers, he goes on to become a cop, and because he has an exceptional brain, makes for a very good investigator. But we discover all this later. The book begins with Decker returning home one night, and finding his family slaughtered—his wife, little daughter and brother-in-law.

He is so devastated that he almost takes his own life, and is prevented from pulling the trigger by his police friends who arrive at the scene of the crime.  The shock unravels him—he gives up his job, loses his home and car, becomes a recluse, making a sparse living as a private eye.

As he is sliding deeper into his own hell—he cannot even forget-- two things happen; a man walks into the police station and confesses to the killing. And in the local school, a masked killer guns down several students and teachers.

The man, Sebastian Leopold, is not the killer, he has a cast iron alibi—he was in jail when Decker’s family was murdered. So why did he confess?  Then a connection is found between the two sets of killings and Decker is dragged into the investigation.

The killer leaves clues and taunting messages for Decker, expressing a strong hatred for the man. Decker is bewildered, because he does not remember ever hurting anyone so badly that they would turn around and kill innocent people as revenge.

The plot is convoluted and very unpredictable. The reader can never guess who the psycho is, even when the character makes a couple of appearances before Decker finally figures out who his enemy is; by then the body count has risen and every corpse is a message for the ex-cop. Decker also acquires a journalist sidekick called Alexandra Jamison, and an admirer in FBI Agent Bogart, who are likely to appear in future Decker novels, along with his former police partner Mary Lancaster—a fine bunch of characters.

The story may be convoluted and a bit far-fetched, but also gripping and intense. The next Amos Decker book will come out next year, and Baldacci fans must already be waiting. when a man begins with such lacerating tragedy, his life and work can only get better.

Memory Man

Written by David Baldacci

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 416

The Himalaya Club

Mountain Echoes

Australian writer and barrister, John Lang (1816-1864), is best known having defended the Rani of Jhansi in court against the British East India Company, but as this book proves, was a fine raconteur with razor sharp observations about life in India, under the British Raj in the nineteenth century.

The Himalaya Club and Other Entertainments from the Raj, a slim volume, with a very enjoyable foreword by Ruskin Bond (the Mussourie connection), has a selection of Lang’s writings. He wrote of the scandals, the court cases and the strange, often hilarious, goings on during his time in North India. He travelled quite a lot, and wrote with a tremendous sense of humour—not even sparing himself. The language may be outdated, but the writing still has punch.

The Himalaya Club
John Lang
Speaking Tiger
Rs 199; Pages 135

Luckiest Girl Alive.

Blessings Counted

TifAni FaNelli—that’s the way her name is spelt—is the tough heroine of Jessica Knoll’s latest bestseller, Luckiest Girl Alive.

By age 28, she has reinvented herself as Ani, the stylish editor with the upmarket, The Women’s Magazine. She has clawed her way up from her small town, middle-class past and as a badge of achievement flaunts the emerald and diamond engagement ring given to her by the rich, handsome and prize ‘catch’ Luke Harrison. The ring papers over any cracks she may have in her façade, but she cannot get over a terrible secret from her past.

By today’s standards, Ani (“Ahnee not Annie”) has it all—beauty, almost size zero figure, perfect hair, designer outfits and accessories, an enviable job, a doting fiancé, a splashy society wedding in a few weeks, when the strings start to unravel.

All through her teen years she is as embarrassed by her curvy figure as by her mother who drives a flashy BMW,  and wears garish make-up. Even as a child, Ani realises that, “Education, travel, culture — this is what any pennies pinched should be used for, never flashy cars, loud logos, or personal maintenance.”

It is all connected with what she went through at school, when she tried desperately to belong to the ‘It’ group of rich kids, who allowed her entry, but made her pay a terrible price. The humiliation she went through was enough to break another teenager; Ani survives with some help from a sympathetic teacher, Mr Larson, but not without major damage.

As if this public flaying was not enough, something worse happens – much later in the book when the reader feels assured that Ani is safe. It is this second incident that scars her psyche—why she is called “luckiest girl alive” has nothing to go with good fortune, quite the opposite, in fact.

Knoll has worked Cosmopolitan and Self  magazines, so she gets the initial cut-throat The Devil Wears Prada vibe perfectly. Ani is the superior bitch who judges other women by their appearance, so confident is she of her own perfection. But nobody can pretend all their life, is what Ani finally figures out.

Knoll’s book—dark and twisted below all that glamour—is being compared to Gillian Flynn’s mega-seller Gone Girl. The move rights have already been picked up by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Pacific Standard, as was Gone Girl.  Knoll’s book is a damning critique of the sexism, misogyny and class snobbery built into American society, while keeping the tone chick-lit breezy, thus mocking the accepted conventions of the ‘women’s novel.’ 

Luckiest Girl Alive

By Jessica Knoll

Published by Simon & Schuster

Pages: 352

Autobiography of a Mad Nation

Insanity Unlimited

Sriram Karri’s Autobiography of a Mad Nation begins thus: “I was born in a mentally retarded country.”

That is enough to hook the reader—at least an Indian reader—who understands and identifies with the writer’s words.  Karri’s second book was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in and has enough merit to be on that enviable list.

Like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the book hurtles through real events that India has witnessed in the recent past—the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, anti-Sikh riots, the Ram Janmabhoomi episode and its aftermath, Mandal Commission protests, economic liberalisation, Gujarat riots. His journalistic credentials give Karri the ability to research well, contextualize and write in a direct and unpretentious style. There is, of course, enough masala in the story to convince the reader, that India is indeed mad nation, and getting worse by the day.

The book’s angry protagonist, Vikrant Vaidya, writes to the President of India to decide whether or not he is guilty of the crime (murder of a Muslim boy called Iqbal) for which he has been convicted. The President gets M. Vidyasagar, retired head of the CBI to investigate. And what emerges is a plot with many twists and turns and a cast of prominent characters, that places the blame for India’s insanity right where it belongs.

Autobiography of a Mad Nation

By Sriram Karri

Published by Fingerprint

Pages: 382